HANDS ON APROACH

After setting all media components for fast handling, mostly making stocks for all added solids, and stocks for stock solutions preparation. -Please ignore excessive stocks =).- My next goal was to start tracing the origin of the existing contaminations. In the original protocol developed for the company, the co-existence of a strain of bacteria with the basal callus of the Galega cv clones was a predisposition for normal growth without signs of chlorosis.

This made things more complicated, specially in what concerns to colony dissociation between diferent bacteria, "good ones" and "bad ones".

A first step was to make frequent (3x per week) surveillance to the culture flasks identifying: type of contamination, fungal or bacterial, place of appearence, medium or explant. Later i asked my co-workers to please identify the flasks with theyr names to see if any sistematic gesture or procedure during the handling was introducing the contaminations. 

As time went by i started to distinguish  a few standard contaminations at the lab and identifying them more accuratly at inicial stage of development.

From the start, the fungal contaminations seemed more frequent than the bacterial infections, wich were also somewhat disguised by the simbiotic bacteria wich had the capacity to develop inside the agar making it cloudy . Later on, the first numbers confirmed that fungus were more than two thirds of the total infection percentage wich oscilated between 20%  and 30% of all newly handled plant material. These percentages were extremelly high for the laboratory ecomical viability, moreover because the explants had to pass by three diferent handlings until a small rooted olive explant was obtained. The result was the previously observed incapacity to produce a large number of plants. It is relevant to say that with such high contamination rate, the laboratory would quicly destroy all cultures if it wasn't for the olive's explants extreme resistence to most of the contaminations, wich in most cases didn't even stop the normal explant development untill critical take over, of the vessels, by the fungus.