Post: #1

I've been thinking of trying to grow or culture some bioluminescent organisms as a kind of new hobby. The cheapest stuff I can find that's actually available for purchase is from ATCC. Pseudomonas flourescens sells for $350 there. Or a little less if I can convince them that I'm not a for-profit institution.

Other glowing lifeforms that I'd like to get my grubby hands on include
Vargula hilgendorfii



Mycena luxaeterna




Aliivibrio fischeri


Noctiluca Scintillans




panellus"‘stipticus

I've read some forums about this stuff being cultured from fresh fish, but not only does that sound hard, but I'm vegetarian so I'd prefer another route.

I figured I'd post here for advice or shared interest since there are a few knowledgeable people about. I don't see how they can sell sea monkies online and not have this stuff selling like hotcakes.

For what it's worth, most stuff only glows during its growth phase. Even so, this stuff seems freaky cool.

... found a site for buying Panellus-stipticus. $18. Woot!



Once I get this stuff growing or if I have extra innoculant I'd be happy to share with interested parties.

Post: #2

Cool! If you get anything that works well and can make spore prints or a culture vial I may be able to make a terrarium, sound neat!
A good pressure cooker is great if you don't have access to an autoclave, I did a lot of successful culturing in my garage in college using homebrew sterile technique.

At the south end of Lido beach in Sarasota Florida there are bioluminescent critters in the water, we used to go swimming there in the evening at the park and running your hands through the water would make the glowing trails - definitely a bucket list experience!

(08-25-2012 8:57 PM)wiserd Wrote:  I've been thinking of trying to grow or culture some bioluminescent organisms as a kind of new hobby. The cheapest stuff I can find that's actually available for purchase is from ATCC. Pseudomonas flourescens sells for $350 there. Or a little less if I can convince them that I'm not a for-profit institution.

Other glowing lifeforms that I'd like to get my grubby hands on include
Vargula hilgendorfii



Mycena luxaeterna




Aliivibrio fischeri


Noctiluca Scintillans




panellus"‘stipticus

I've read some forums about this stuff being cultured from fresh fish, but not only does that sound hard, but I'm vegetarian so I'd prefer another route.

I figured I'd post here for advice or shared interest since there are a few knowledgeable people about. I don't see how they can sell sea monkies online and not have this stuff selling like hotcakes.

For what it's worth, most stuff only glows during its growth phase. Even so, this stuff seems freaky cool.

... found a site for buying Panellus-stipticus. $18. Woot!



Once I get this stuff growing or if I have extra innoculant I'd be happy to share with interested parties.

Post: #3

Sweet! ... any advice as far as the pressure cooker is concerned?

Post: #4

I got one at a yard sale for a song, one big enough to hold 10 full-size mason jars deal with decent seals but no wire lifter rack. Probably very dangerous as there is no way to know if the pressure gauge is accurate or if the emergency pressure release valve works...

A new one isn't cheap, but DIY sterile technique is reasonable easy if you are willing to sit, watch, wait, and calibrate the stove temperature with the pressure release valve to keep it at proper temp long enough.

I used aluminum foil to cover the jars containing a mixture of uncooked rye and some other nutrients to be the growing medium for my spore prints, and I had some agar-based plates wrapped around with parafilm that I sterilzed to get the spore prints started with a fairly generic mixture I cooked up (with aluminum foil over the mouth of the beaker it was cooking in).
Once the jars were strerilized they could pretty much just sit out since they were covered - most contaminants fall from the air covering is most important.
For innoculation I rigged up a positive-air pressure hood with window screen frames (six frames taped together) and taped clear sheet plastic around the inside to make the hood. A couple of slits in the front to allow me to put stuff and my hands inside were enough of a working opening. I rigged a squirrelcage fan from a junk shop with an air filter over the air intake and sprayed the shit out of its insides with lysol to kill any lurking microbes. A couple of pieces of plastic formed into a tube and duct tape made the air intake to inflate the hood. Had to cut some slits in the tube since I had no way to regulate the speed of the fan - a rheostat like the kind for electric trains would have probably worked as long as it was DC in and out.
I wore rubber gloves and had a can of lysol inside the hood so I could sterilize the working surfaces and interior, then I brought the jars, plates, and spore prints into the hood and re-sterilized the outside of everything with lysol.
I had an alcohol burner and an innoculating loop (thin wire on a metal shaft) that was flamed, scratched on the spores, swiped on the medium. Keeping the plates closed as much as possible is critical. I put a strip of parafilm around the agar plates to keep airborne contaminants out after innoculation.
Some of the plates took, others did nothing, some grew contaminants of various colors - the spore prints themselves were most likely rife with microbes.
The ones that took and were clean were cut into sections and placed into the grain jars. Some took, some didn't, some became contaminated. It's a numbers game so I only used a few of the good plates - it only takes a small chunk to populate a whole jar within a couple of weeks.
Once the jars were going they were kept in a sterilized cooler that had sterilized water covered with a sterilized paper towel over it to keep the chamber moist.
Your interest would probably diverge at this point where you would put something that was growing nicely on a decorative growing surface like a terrarium log or aquarium reef thing, filling a hole with innoculated growing medium and keeping it moist.
There are probably much easier ways but since I was working on a bioscience farm at the time I did sterile technique every day and wanted to see how homebrew approaches would work, and it wasn't very hard at all.
A lot of the stuff you are looking at would most likely do fine being handled with sterilized tools and surfaces (lysol) as long as the sanitizer didn't hang around to kill the stuff you want to grow, and you could probably dispense with the positive airflow hood. If you want to grow in a sterile medium, the pressure cooker would be great, since you can cook roast and other food very quickly when you up the pressure, and some love canning stuff as well!
Enjoy! This may be my longest post in months!

Post: #5

Sorry for the stupid question, but, can you put that into pheromones? For aesthetic effect, I mean.

Post: #6

Awesome. thanks for all the help. I'm familiar with sterile technique from microbio lab. I'm sure I'm going to be referring back to this page and asking for help when my first attempts go awry. ;-)

@ FSH - you should be able to put this stuff on your skin. The stipticus was used to stanch bleeding in the past, so it shouldn't be that toxic even if exposed to open wounds. And there's no problem swimming with scintillia. The dinoflaggelates can produce some toxic byproducts as waste, IIRC, but aren't themselves toxic. I don't know the exact mechanism for all the species offhand, but most of this stuff works based on some kind of luciferase/luciferin enzyme system (that's kindof generic, since some very different molecules are called luciferins or luciferases). So it's not phosphoresence where light is absorbed and re-emitted but more like a reaction where a particular substrate is eventually used up. If you've ever smeared a firefly across a surface and watched it glow for a few minutes afterwards, you have some idea of what'd be possible and how long it might last. Most organisms will only produce light when growing or, in the case of some microorganisms, when exposed to some kind of shock or movement.

What would you hope to accomplish by mixing this with mones? Would you want to draw attention to them like that? I'd really have to look at the specific system to guess if there'd be a reaction between the mones and the androstanes. I'd guess that the sulfated androstanes would have the greatest likelihood of accidentally reacting with a luciferase while the other mones should probably be safe. But that's just a guess and I'd need to look at the particular system. The short answer is the two probably won't react, but they could. I'd love to be able to test mone concentrations by adding a drop of luciferase and looking for the glow. And if we could find some cheap supply of luciferin for a luciferin-luciferase system maybe we could make a gel or otherwise fix the luciferase so we could keep adding more substrate to keep the fires burning.

If I get a nice culture of this stuff growing, I'm certainly going to see if I can put it through a blender and make my own glowsticks from the extract. But it's likely to be a long process of trial and error.

Post: #7

Wow, thanks for the detailed explanation!

Well, I was just wondering about blacklight in clubs and how cool it would be if you sprayed mones with biolumi organisms over a stencil on your neck. Something like this:



I mean, you have a kiss, a heart or a smiley on you neck made that's made out of green glowy androstenol. How ice-breakable is that?

Post: #8

Ha! A glowing mone temporary tatoo! That would be RAD!

Woohoo - a hit on Google!
OD may be good for this since it is thick
Cut a stencil from low-tack adhesive art paper and leave it on for applying the paint, let dry, then apply mones?

Post: #9

Could be great, 2S2C!

Post: #10

(09-01-2012 1:15 PM)Fly So Hi Wrote:  Could be great, 2S2C!

Hey FSH, one thing to consider is blacklight makeup + a portable black light around your neck.

Blacklight makeup on this site.



... hmm... a little alpha androstenol in a glowing bubble solution? That would get the party talking.