Updates, Information, and Protocols
Providing an update on this thread and hopefully some useful information:
We ended up caving and getting the qPCR unit from Chai Biosciences, the thermocycler is designed to work with the PCR kits produce by PIKA Wienhenstephan in Germany. The unit has been working well, and has helped us immensely in IDing potential sources of infection in our brewery and truly taking a proactive approach to dealing with this organism.
They do recommend that you run an enrichment specifically when looking for diastaticus as it can be hard to detect at low concentrations, we are running side by side analysis right now on finished beers of enriched and unenriched samples to determine if it is actually necessary for us.
In the meantime, with the help of a laboratory intern, we have set out to isolate the specific strain of diastaticus growing in our brewery with the hopes of developing a low cost method/assay for detecting Diastaticus, and we beleive we have stumbled onto something that might work well, we are still collecting data, but basically we have figured out how to achieve a nearly 100% Maltodextrin media broth for enrichment of Diastaticus for Durham tube fermentation tests (if anything ferments in pure maltodextrin, then you know you have a problem), we will be validating the protocol with PCR and are also experimenting with it as an enrichment media for our beers for Diastaticus detection. As soon as the final results are in, i will post the method and protocol up here along with the data for feedback and potential validation by other interested folks.
This is also coinciding with our attempts to better characterize our particular Diastaticus strain, now that we have isolated it (our isolated were validated as positive by our PCR machine), we will be testing its growth efficacy on various conventional and unconventional medias in an attempt to be able to better isolate this organism using traditional micro methods in addition to PCR screening.
Providing an update on this thread and hopefully some useful information:
We ended up caving and getting the qPCR unit from Chai Biosciences, the thermocycler is designed to work with the PCR kits produce by PIKA Wienhenstephan in Germany. The unit has been working well, and has helped us immensely in IDing potential sources of infection in our brewery and truly taking a proactive approach to dealing with this organism.
They do recommend that you run an enrichment specifically when looking for diastaticus as it can be hard to detect at low concentrations, we are running side by side analysis right now on finished beers of enriched and unenriched samples to determine if it is actually necessary for us.
In the meantime, with the help of a laboratory intern, we have set out to isolate the specific strain of diastaticus growing in our brewery with the hopes of developing a low cost method/assay for detecting Diastaticus, and we beleive we have stumbled onto something that might work well, we are still collecting data, but basically we have figured out how to achieve a nearly 100% Maltodextrin media broth for enrichment of Diastaticus for Durham tube fermentation tests (if anything ferments in pure maltodextrin, then you know you have a problem), we will be validating the protocol with PCR and are also experimenting with it as an enrichment media for our beers for Diastaticus detection. As soon as the final results are in, i will post the method and protocol up here along with the data for feedback and potential validation by other interested folks.
This is also coinciding with our attempts to better characterize our particular Diastaticus strain, now that we have isolated it (our isolated were validated as positive by our PCR machine), we will be testing its growth efficacy on various conventional and unconventional medias in an attempt to be able to better isolate this organism using traditional micro methods in addition to PCR screening.
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