Oxoid, part of Thermo Fisher Scientific, is a leading brand in microbiology.

For over 70 years, it has been at the forefront of microbiological development, contributing to the introduction of new and innovative solutions to the world’s microbiological challenges. The Oxoid range of products is used in clinical and industrial laboratories to isolate and identify the bacteria or other organisms that cause disease or spoilage. Oxoid is associated with high quality products by microbiologists around the globe.

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Culture Media
These provide essential nutrients for micro-organisms (bugs) to grow. They can be non-selective (nutrient rich, allowing growth of many different organisms) or selective (containing inhibitory agents that will prevent the growth of most micro-organisms but will allow target organisms to grow).

Culture media is available in two generic formats:

• Dehydrated culture media
  Blended powders which customers will re-hydrate, sterilise and then dispense and quality control test, themselves, before use
• Prepared media (made in Adelaide, Lenexa, Ontario, Perth, Malaysia, and Wesel)
  media which has been rehydrated, sterilised, dispensed and quality control tested, and is ready-to-use

Laboratory Preparations, Peptones & Hydrolysates
Nutritious amino acid (protein) powders, commonly produced from extracts of meat, are used to grow bugs to high numbers. Used for vaccine manufacture and fermentation, peptones are also a primary constituent of culture media.

Freeze Dried Supplements
These are freeze dried cocktails of inhibitory compounds, intended to prevent growth of many different types of micro-organisms while allowing target bugs to grow, and used to make certain culture media selective. They often contain substances that cannot be added to the culture media powder for some reason. For example, they may be heat labile, so will not withstand the heat sterilization process. Freeze Dried Supplements are aseptically rehydrated and added to media after sterilization.

Supplementary Reagents and Blood Products
Products made from blood and egg yolk are used to make culture media more nutritious. They can also make the culture media more “diagnostic”, as some bugs can break them down, producing clear zones around the growth.

Microbial Identification Products
These products differentiate bacteria using the principle that different bugs can produce reactions with different chemicals. Using a coloured indicator, these biochemical reactions can be used to identify different species of micro-organisms.

Antimicrobial Susceptibility Testing Products
These products are used to determine whether or not a bug is susceptible or resistant to a particular antibiotic. This information is very important in determining the best treatment for someone with an infection

Immunoassays
Immunoassays are used in the clinical setting. They use specific antibodies to detect the presence of a pathogen in a specimen, by binding to specific structures on the micro-organisms surface (antigens). If the sample added to the immunoassay microtray contains the target bugs, they bind to the antibody. This can be used to detect their presence.

Culti-Loops and Quanti-Cult
These are stabilized preparations of micro-organisms which customers use to quality control their media and conduct experiments. The strains are all from a known source, and so the bugs can be expected to behave in a standardised manner.

• Culti-Loops™ - qualitative (undefined, high number) for general purpose testing
• Quanti-Cult™ - quantitative (known number) used for performance testing (e.g. you know how many are in the kit, so you know how many you can expect to recover).

Atmosphere Generation Systems
Some bacteria (anaerobes) are killed by oxygen, while others (micro-aerophiles) prefer increased levels of carbon dioxide. There are 2 products ranges under the Oxoid brand designed to provide suitable environments for these bugs to grow. Both use chemical reactions to remove oxygen from the air and produce carbon dioxide, but they work on very different principles.