this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2024
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Microbiology labs. It’s this weird microbe-on-agar musk.
That's a good one, I like it too!
I got excited the first day I saw a case of chocolate agar come in. Then I read what it was.... 😔
Now, some of the labs where they compounded, they had all the flavor extracts, so doing inventory on that stuff I'd take my time and take big whiffs of fake banana and grape candy flavor. Way better than the VOCs and weird metals I normally got to smell in most of the lab and chem store areas.
Wow, cool! I had never thought about it, but it certainly makes sense you'd need blood in those dishes to get certain things to grow.
There are a ton of them, though I've only seen about a half dozen of these. Wikipedia has a nice list of what they are and what they're used for.
There are even contests for agar art.
"The Battle of Winter and Spring," ASM's 2018 Agar Art Contest first-place winner, by Ana Tsitsishvili, Undergraduate Student, Agricultural University of Georgia, Tbilisi, Georgia.
ELI5 video how it's made
The liquid growth medium my college used smelled so, so much like a mix between chicken noodle and miso soup it was unnerving. Mostly because of how good it smelled. Lucky microbes in their soup bath.
Ick! Glad you like it because I don't! I work adjacent to a microbiology lab and I hate when the smells end up wafting in!