Facility Details

The Penn Microbial Culture and Metabolomics Core provides aerobic and anaerobic culturing services and targeted metabolomics analysis, as well as consultation towards experimental design, method development, and data analyses. Culture studies include isolation of microbial taxa from mammalian samples; interrogation of the physiology of microbial strains under different conditions (e.g., anaerobic/microaerobic/aerobic, differing nutrient limitations) using isolated strains or strains obtained from culture collections (another service offered by the core); co-culturing of defined microbial consortia to investigate microbe-microbe interactions, and; preparation of microbial products (live bacteria, heat-killed bacteria, bacterial supernatants) from single or defined-mixed microbial cultures for use in mammalian cell culture and/or animal model systems. The metabolomics component of the core provides researchers with targeted metabolomics of amino, bile, and short chain fatty acids and features a Waters Acquity uPLC System with photodiode and QDa single quadropole mass detectors as well as an autosampler.