In which we’re too close for comfort

It was always going to be a difficult relationship.

We knew from the very start that they weren’t very well-suited. After all, they came from such different backgrounds. They were used to such radically different environments. They scarcely even spoke the same language, and they certainly held radically disparate views about the best way to lead their lives. Despite everything, we held hope in our hearts that somehow, they’d manage to set aside their differences and co-exist in harmony.

Alas, we were wrong.

Yes, phase one of an important sociological experiment in now completed in my lab, rather like a reality TV show featuring the world’s most incompatible roommates. And I’m sad to report that it’s Eubacteria, 1…

…and Eukaryotes, nil.

So what do you do when you suddenly find yourself in charge of a lab that needs to culture both sterile human cells, but also bacterially infected human cells? And you only have one tissue culture room?

The room in question had been the domain of microbiologists when I arrived. Nobody was doing regular cell culture. There were two sterile hoods, both of which were used to culture infected patient cells – and for some reason, despite the presence of seven entire empty bays in the main lab, all nine undergraduate students were also using the same small room to streak out all their bacteria onto agar plates. The place was practically humming with prokaryotic vibes.

So I banished the students, the Petri dishes and the bacterial incubator, ordered the room and its hoods stripped down and organized a deep clean of every conceivable surface with detergent and bleach. After a week-long quarantine in which no one was allowed in, I imported a clean CO2 incubator, CO2 tanks, a water bath and a new fridge. The right-hand hood was to be for sterile tissue culture only, and the left was for experiments with bacteria in them – only when sterility was absolutely necessary. No reagents were to be shared between the two users. In addition, no bacterially infected cultures were allowed in the new gas incubator; instead I bought in some CO2-independent media and rigged up a moist chamber inside the dry 37-degree incubators for the microbiologists to use (using an old baby-bottle sterilizing chamber we found up on a shelf – don’t ask). Then and only then did I order my bladder epithelial cells, thaw them out and put them into culture.

There were a few unavoidable shared elements allied to the two separate workstations. We have only one centrifuge, so while I bleached a dedicated set of adapters for cell work, there was no avoiding the fact that the two camps’ samples would have to share the same air space while spinning. There is only one inverted microscope, too, so sterile and infected plates sit for a time on the same stage. And of course, the air inside the TC room might be wafting a few hundred CFUs more than the normal atmosphere at any given time. Nevertheless, I thought it we were all careful and considerate, it just might work.

I cultured my cells happily for a week with no problem – and then the first microbiologist came in to do an experiment in the left-hand hood. A particularly manky set of samples, I noted uneasily – so full of rods that the medium was cloudy. The day after, on a hot afternoon when the temperature probably hit 30 degrees inside the sunny room, I taught one of my colleagues how to split cells and charged him with maintaining the line from then on. Just before the Easter break, one flask was contaminated, and today, the other one succumbed as well. I don’t know if it was caused by the incompatible roommate problem, the heat, or simple newbie bad luck – after all, many beginners get contaminations in their first month at it. Too many variables to say for sure.

We’ll wipe everything down and try again. What else can we do?