What a beautiful world we live in! I love how niche this is (to me). Devotion is such a wonderful thing to behold. I had never even thought of thinking about the relative risks of growing algae strains until this moment. Thanks for sharing!
a sliver of context would be nice. the substack just drops right into evaluating safety for algae. but why? i have a reef tank so I know how dangerous dinoflagellates and other microorganisms can be, but you drop readers in with no context to any of this and just show yourself prompting llms to ask how dangerous they are. I feel like someone picked a random page out of their journal and posted it here.
I do enjoy more personal interactions and writing online, like how old blogs used to be. There is a certain clean "voice" and standard story flow so many articles have today that just feel like corporate presentations, I get quite tired of it.
I recall a recent article where some enthusiast was swearing and being a bit flippant in their article, it got highly criticised even though the topic matter was excellent and deep. There's room in the world for some people to be a bit rough around the edges.
>"The second risk is that the sample isn't completely pure. As with any biological sample, it's hard to avoid contamination. It's likely that other bacteria or organisms might be present in the sample. And so we have secondary risks from other organisms coinciding with the sample. At the moment, this is the biggest risk but I still think it's low. The evaluation of such risks will be dedicated to a different blogpost."
So this article titled "Safety in Algae Home Experiments" completely omits evaluating the "biggest risk".
Unless you're growing black dot mold for citric acid or something, the culture you're _intentionally_ trying to cultivate is generally not going to be the problem - the problem will be what you're cultivating that you _didn't_ intend to cultivate. It's the same with mycoculture. If you do not know what is inside the container you are opening, you may end up with a face full of trichoderma spores.
Stay safe and do not play around with contam, folks. Not even once.
I do enjoy more personal interactions and writing online, like how old blogs used to be. There is a certain clean "voice" and standard story flow so many articles have today that just feel like corporate presentations, I get quite tired of it.
I recall a recent article where some enthusiast was swearing and being a bit flippant in their article, it got highly criticised even though the topic matter was excellent and deep. There's room in the world for some people to be a bit rough around the edges.
So this article titled "Safety in Algae Home Experiments" completely omits evaluating the "biggest risk".
Unless you're growing black dot mold for citric acid or something, the culture you're _intentionally_ trying to cultivate is generally not going to be the problem - the problem will be what you're cultivating that you _didn't_ intend to cultivate. It's the same with mycoculture. If you do not know what is inside the container you are opening, you may end up with a face full of trichoderma spores.
Stay safe and do not play around with contam, folks. Not even once.