Improved methods and culture media for production, quantification and isolation of bacteriophages infecting Flavobacterium columnare

摘要

The present invention is directed to a culture medium for growing Flavobacterium columnare comprising essential nutritional ingredients for the growth of bacteria and mucin or another mucus component as a supplement. The invention is also directed to a method for producing bacteriophages infecting Flavobacterium columnare, the method comprising the steps of adding Flavobacterium columnare bacterium to a sterile culture medium supplemented with mucin or another mucus component, incubating said culture medium, thereby obtaining a bacterial culture, optionally collecting the supernatant containing floating (planktonic) bacterial cells from said culture and transferring the supernatant to a new container in order to discard most of the biofilm and adding a bacteriophage infecting Flavobacterium columnare to said bacterial culture obtained from a previous step, and incubating the culture until the phage yield increases or peaks. Addition of mucin to soft-agar culture medium is proposed as an optimized technique for viral titration.