Abstract
THE partial replacement of sodium chloride in a culture medium for a marine bacterium by sucrose or potassium chloride was recently described1. The non-specific solute requirement was shown to control the rate of growth and under the conditions of experimentation was not concerned with osmotic fragility. Some previous workers found relatively little replacement of sodium salts by other solutes and concluded that the organisms being studied had little or no osmotic requirement2,3. In contrast, the solute requirements of the marine luminescent bacterium Photobacterium fischeri, both for growth and metabolism, were found to be non-specific and were considered to be primarily osmotic4,5. The various findings suggested the existence of species variation with respect to this property among marine bacteria. As a direct approach to a better understanding of this situation, samples of sea-water were plated directly on to media having either sodium chloride, potassium chloride, or sucrose as the principal solute. The purpose was to determine the proportion of cells in a natural inoculum which would allow a partial replacement of sodium chloride in the growth medium.
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PRATT, D. Specificity of the Solute Requirement by Marine Bacteria on Primary Isolation from Sea-water. Nature 199, 1308 (1963). https://doi.org/10.1038/1991308a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/1991308a0
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