Customer Spotlight Video

Description:

Dr. Niokhor Dione, D.V.M., M.Sc., Ph.D., VP of Microbial Discovery at AnimalBiome, leads a team focused on identifying gut microbes that can be developed into products to improve the health and wellbeing of cats and dogs. He leverages Biolog’s anaerobic chambers and growth media to culture and isolate organisms that couldn’t previously be grown. Biolog’s PM plates also help them optimize growth conditions like finding the best carbon sources and pH for production strains. Watch this video to learn more.

Transcript:

During my PhD, I was part of the team that developed a method called microbial culturomics which allows the identification and characterization of the microbial composition of the gut microbiota in humans. We extended this method to many fields including animal science and environmental science as well.

Currently with AnimalBiome, I’ve developed and designed a department, the Microbial Discovery and Development department. Our core work is identifying microbes that are important for cats and dogs and designing products around them.

I came across Anaerobe Systems when I was a postdoc back in Canada in 2019. As I said earlier, we developed a method called microbial culturomics that uses a lot of culture conditions to identify bacteria from the gut microbiome. But back in France, we were making those culture media. Anaerobe Systems helped me around ready-to-use media. So, to do my culturing now, I don’t need to make those media. I can just get them off the shelf and use them. This helps us reduce the time we spend making those media. It also helps us identify bacteria we were not able to identify in the past because we didn’t have those media available. Those are some of the products that I use.

And another way that Anaerobe Systems also helps us is through a custom media making system. I remember back when I was a postdoc at Stanford University we were designing microbial culturing in the context of the Microbiome Initiative therapies. We needed to target specific bacteria that we were not able to grow. So, we designed some culture media based on the literature and based on our knowledge and we sent those recipes to Anaerobe Systems. And they were able to make those media for us which was extremely helpful in identifying some of the key bacteria that we needed.

I’m familiar with a lot of anaerobic chambers, for example the Coy, the Don Whitley. I’ve used all of them, back in France and also here in the United States. One thing that I can say about the AS-500 from Anaerobe Systems is the ability of this chamber to not allow oxygen to get in. With other anaerobic chambers, when materials enter the chamber, usually oxygen gets in, but it can be flushed out over time when you run a cycle. But with the AS-500, the ability of the chamber to systematically sense a bit of oxygen getting in is extremely important to preserve the integrity of some microbes that are extremely oxygen sensitive.

On another hand, one of the things that I have also been using from Biolog is the panel for identifying microbes. I’ve used, in the past, those panels to not only identify microbes, but to identify what are the key elements that this microbe needs to grow. For example, we had a story where we had some bacteria that were not growing well. To know what is the best way to grow these bacteria, we put them on the Biolog plates and identified what are the main chemicals, what are the main conditions that these bacteria need. And we designed the specific media including the right pH, carbon source, and amino acids that this microbe needs. And we were able to get those bacteria growing better using the Biolog identification panel.

I think it’s very important for us to understand all the microbes that live in us. There’s a lot of companies that develop microbiome based therapeutics. Those solutions are extremely important for the future of disease control. But I think one of the key component to keep the microbiome field going forward is the ability for us to grow those bacteria. We need to be able to grow every single bacterium that lives in us, to be able to understand what they’re doing. The only way to do that is to keep culturing them. Having a company like Anaerobe Systems that makes media for us, that makes anaerobic chambers for us, I think will be very important for the future. We need to develop more culture media, more new media to be able to identify all the unknown bacteria and know what they can do for the future.