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General Yeast Growth

  • If you have a long experiment and you want to start early with yeast in log phase, you can dilute in the evening and grow it overnight to hit mid-log in the morning. There is a calculator in the Dropbox. For that you should put starters on in the morning a day before, so you’ll be able to dilute it in the evening.

  • You can leave yeast starters on the bench over the weekend, they will be ready to be back diluted on Sunday. Similarly, you can leave yeast agar plates at room temperature (in a drawer or in a box, not sealed completely to allow air flow) and colonies will be ready in two days.

  • If you plan to do protein/RNA extraction from cells, you can gently spin down the cells, wash once and snap freeze the pellets in LN2/dry ice-EtOH bath. These can be stored in -80 until you are ready to process them.

  • Clean your fridge ~ 1x a month, to see if you have spare plates and verify you have replicated everything that needs to be refreshed or should be thrown away. Your spare plates can be placed in the general fridge at the ‘spare plates’ box. Do not forget to fill the information about these plates so they can be used by other lab members.

  • For measuring OD make sure you are reading in the linear range, 0.1-0.5 (in 0.6 it goes down to 93% accuracy and then further). This will be approx. 20 microliters from the O/N culture diluted in 980 microliters of DDW/YPD or 500 microliter of midlog sample in 500 microliter of DDW/YPD (can also be 250 into 750).

  • Glass tubes can be used directly in the OD reader. This is particularly useful so as not to waste any volume of your precious culture when growing cells to mid-log phase. Simply use another glass tube with the same media as your blank (3ml are sufficient for the light beam to cross through the liquid). Do not forget to vortex your tube before measuring OD.

  • Take into consideration that different strains grow differently, so if you are planning an experiment that relies on the cells to grow in a certain time (for example – B.D in transformation or westerns) – you may have to change plans accordingly.