4.2.1 Storage or preservation media
Storage, or preservation, media are used for storing viable bacterial isolates for long periods. This is necessary to enable further analyses, for example antimicrobial susceptibility testing for surveillance.
What property is required of a good storage medium?
Answer
One important property is the ability to retain moisture, particularly if the sample is to be stored at room temperature. Hence, storage media are often provided in slants (see Figure 5), rather than plates, as slants have a reduced air-to-surface interface compared with plates.
Once inoculated onto an appropriate storage medium, the isolates are kept at the correct temperature according to future use (see Section 6).
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4.2 Types of media
