Final yr, in July, Reine Protacio’s experiments all of the sudden stopped working. Each scientist encounters baffling outcomes every so often; you chalk it as much as error, repeat the experiment, and hope for the most effective. However on this case, the issue didn’t resolve and in reality unfold to different members of the lab: Their yeast, which usually multiples with such intense fecundity that 500 colonies may bloom throughout a single laboratory dish, had develop into stunted. Now they have been getting simply two colonies, perhaps three—lonely white dots in a sea of nothing. It was as if one thing was poisoning the yeast.
After two straight months of failed experiments, Protacio went in search of a offender. Her lab as soon as had a defective water air purifier, so she switched the water supply. No distinction. She systematically changed the sugar and different vitamins for rising yeast. No distinction. The thriller, she ultimately discovered, ran deeper and wider than she thought. And when she and her colleagues on the College of Arkansas for Medical Sciences began sharing her findings, a number of scientists all over the world reported related tales of ruined experiments. The instances all pointed to the identical suspect: agar.
Agar is and has been a staple of microbiology labs for a century. “We purchase it in bulk. We purchase kilograms at a time,” Protacio instructed me. Blended with water, the seaweed-derived white powder varieties a sturdy, clear gel good for rising microbes. In my very own transient foray into the laboratory as an undergrad, I poured agar into most likely a whole bunch of petri dishes, a tedious however crucial first step for a lot of experiments. The lab the place Protacio works makes use of agar to develop mannequin organisms known as fission yeast, whose chromosomes have putting similarities with ours. The dangerous agar derailed their experiments for 2 months. Though the lab may recoup the price of the agar, she stated, “they’ll’t reimburse us for the misplaced time and the misplaced productiveness.” So the lab began elevating the alarm.
In February, Wayne Wahls, who co-leads the lab the place Protacio works, wrote to an e-mail checklist of fission-yeast scientists asking if anybody else had encountered related issues. One researcher replied sure, after which one other. A biologist in Massachusetts even had this agar drawback method again in 2006. The extra that Wahls, Protacio, and a rising group of different scientists spoke publicly about the issue—in a preprint paper, then an article in Science—the extra tales they began to listen to. A couple of of the scientists joined a research of the agar as collaborators, and the preprint has since been submitted to a journal.
The complete sample of agar failure that emerged is complicated, although. The issues in agar appear to have come and gone not simply as soon as however a number of occasions, sporadically, through the years—suggesting shocking variability in a regular lab product. Additionally they appear to fade beneath sure circumstances: when petri dishes are stored at nighttime, in response to one lab, or when yeast are fed a nutrient-rich weight loss program, in response to Protacio’s personal work. Dawn Science Merchandise, the corporate that equipped the seemingly poisonous batch to her lab, instructed me it’s been in a position to efficiently develop fission yeast on the identical batch of agar. “Please perceive that we’re NOT disputing their findings of their experimental scenario,” the CEO, Liz Kylin, wrote in an e-mail. Maybe the issue exhibits up solely in sure batches and beneath sure circumstances, which Dawn remains to be attempting to know. “No matter this difficulty seems to be, it’s actually elusive, most likely extraordinarily particular,” Kylin wrote.
Scientists have began to surprise if the potential toxicity originated within the seaweed used to make the agar. That might clarify the variability from batch to batch: Maybe sure components—ecological, meteorological—alter the biochemical make-up of seaweed, the identical method a wheat harvest differs from season to season and wine grapes fluctuate from yr to yr.
Agar can also be utilized in meals, notably in desserts in Asia. (Protacio is from the Philippines, and she or he initially knew agar as an ingredient in sago at gulaman, a cool, candy drink that always incorporates bits of agar jelly.) And laboratory agar truly has its origins in meals too: Within the Eighties, Fanny Hesse recommended that her microbiologist husband use agar in his work, as a result of she had used it to set fruit and vegetable jellies; her mom had heard about it from pals who had lived in Java. At present, nevertheless, culinary and laboratory agar are usually produced from various kinds of seaweed. Agar in meals is often extracted from Gracilaria, which grows readily in massive synthetic ponds and tanks.
Laboratory agar is a extra rarefied product. It comes from Gelidium, a slowly rising wild seaweed that yields a higher-quality agar whose decrease gelling temperature is extra appropriate for lab work. Today, Gelidium is harvested primarily off the coast of Morocco, in response to Dennis Seisun and Nesha Zalesny, who run the industry-analysis agency IMR Worldwide. The pink, frilly seaweed could be collected when it washes ashore, however the finest-quality agar comes from Gelidium gathered from the seabed by skilled divers in the summertime. “When you can reproduce the waters of Morocco in a pond, the corporate would do it,” Zalesny instructed me, however Gelidium has to date resisted makes an attempt at mass cultivation.
The reliance on wild seaweed has precipitated complications for labs earlier than. In 2015, a Gelidium scarcity precipitated the wholesale worth to almost triple. However scientists haven’t, up up to now, been notably eager to discover a substitute for his or her agar. Seisun and Zalesny used to work for a corporation that makes gellan gum, an agar different that may be manufactured completely in a manufacturing facility—no divers wanted, no finicky wild seaweed. But the product by no means took off. “Agar nonetheless is the king and queen and the gold customary,” Seisun instructed me. Protacio’s lab ended up switching to a special agar provider—a less expensive one, truly—and since then all the pieces has been simply nice.
