Bubblers / In-Vial Aeration
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An in-vial aerator, which can be hooked up to a gas stream of your choice. Normal stir bar-based mixing in the eVOLVER does not provide enough gas exchange in many situations. These bubblers produce small bubbles that greatly increase gas exchange.
These stir bars are unfortunately prone to jitter and not stir. This is a function of at least the following:
Distance to magnets on the fan used for stirring
The newest eVOLVERs have a bigger distance to the fan because of the 3D printed magnet holder and 1/4" acrylic spacers
Try ordering thinner acrylic spacers
Shape and smoothness of the glass vial bottom - try several glass vials and see if there is
Please let us know on the forum if you find other stir bars that work with bubbling. However, several people have looked and not found any.
While bubbling, you must stop stirring while taking OD readings to allow bubbles to float to the surface. Otherwise, bubbles will create too much variability in OD readings and make your OD calibration useless.
While calibrating OD, we mimic experimental OD readings as much as possible. To do this:
Turn off stirring via the GUI
Calibrate with long stir bars (see above) and caps with bubblers
Swirl OD standards at least every other time you move them to avoid cell sedimentation
Load a conf.yml onto the server that pauses stir whenever an OD measurement is taken
This decreases data acquisition rate (20 seconds to 60 seconds), but greatly increases OD accuracy
The assumption is that there will be variability between the bubblers that you make -- even though you will screen them before putting them in a vial cap! This is compensated for by bubbling much more than we need for a given microbe's gas consumption needs. Worse bubblers will not be a problem if the worst bubbler you have provides more than enough gas exchange.
Bubblers will produce different sized bubbles depending on media type. This is related to the amount of salts, proteins, carbohydrates, etc that are in the media. These can act as surfactants to create smaller bubbles. Therefore, largest bubbles will be in water and smallest bubbles will be in rich media, as can be seen below:
<Add picture of bubbler in water vs algae media vs LB>
Allows the nylon tube of the bubbler to slot into cap. See for options.
The normal eVOLVER stir bars allow large bubbles to adhere if you are bubbling. This creates lots of noise in OD readings. It is therefore necessary to use thinner stir bars that don't allow such large bubbles to stick to them. We have found these to be the only ones that work with bubbling: .
Guide | example stir pause conf.yml file
Aerators are great substrates for biofilming. If your strain biofilms, make sure you swap in new bubblers when bubbles noticeably diminish. See .