Any idea what this microbe might be?

[WoodlandBrew]

Any one know what this cell might be? It is rod shaped. About 5 microns in diameter and about 15 micron long. It looks kind of like Streptobacilli, but it is much larger. I have read that wild yeast look like this, but never seen any. This is in an experimental wort in my kitchen that I have been taking daily gravity readings and doing daily cell counts, so contamination is a possibility. (I can only be so careful when rushing around after work before dinner) Wort was made with just cane sugar and yeast nutrient. This is toward the end of fermentation. Yeast have started to flocculate, the specific gravity is 0.998 and the ABV level is about 4.5%. It did not stain with methylene blue so I believe it is alive in this environment.

Also, does any one know of a good site or listing of morphology of microbes typically found during fermentation?

 

[Brad2287]

Maybe Schizosaccharomyces pombe. This possibility is completely based on shape and size alone.

 

[dbsmith]

It is much too large to be a bacterium, assuming the sphere shapes are yeast cells. Bacterial cells are way small compared to eukaryotic cells, but yeah it does look like streptobacilli.

Could it be plant cells from hops or grain? A lot of plants have cells of that shape.

 

[step]

It is much too large to be a bacterium, assuming the sphere shapes are yeast cells. Bacterial cells are way small compared to eukaryotic cells, so it can't be streptobacillus.

That's what I was thinking. I assume you scrolled around looking at most of slide? Did you notice others forming chains like the one in the picture?

 

[step]

Don't know the cell sizes off the top of my head, but knowing the average cell size of champagne yeast is ~1/10 of your average ale yeast that does complicate my previous post. Hmmmmm

 

[dbsmith]

Some potentially pathogenic yeast can make psuedohypha...could you have a Candida infection?

 

[dbsmith]

Brettanomyces looks like a possibility.

What is in this mystery wort, anyway?

 

[step]

Brettanomyces looks like a possibility.

Yeah, possibility

 

[WoodlandBrew]

Wow, thanks for all the responses so quickly!

The yeast was harvested from a Strawberry Champagne and the viability was about 1% at that point. I pitched it into a 1.036 wort of table sugar and yeast nutrients. I noticed this type of cell three days during cell counts. At that point there was one chain of two cells in all 25 boxes. Yesterday there were two chains on the slide of two and three cells. These types of cells make up about 0.5% of the total viable cell concentration.

It might be something that came off the strawberries, or possibly algae from the water that was used for the wort.

The scale on the picture should say "50 micrometers." (It's on a hemocytometer, at 1000x so the ruling is 50 micrometers) I was rushing when I put the picture together and wrote microns. That is a mistake.

So it seems like the general consensus is that it is some type of wild yeast or plant?

 

[Kaiser]

Here is an interesting thread on the AHA forum where I posted something similar a while back: http://www.homebrewersassociation.org/forum/index.php?topic=937.msg11940#msg11940

Kai

 

[WoodlandBrew]

Thanks for that link Kai,

Your photo on that thread that you identified looks a lot like what I found. It even has the same ball at the end of the rods. So I guess I'm looking at mold.

 

[ColoHox]

Look very similar to septate fungal hyphae. If this is the case, fungi that produce these structures are ubiquitous, especially on fruit. Many other microbes are significantly smaller, including Schizosaccharomyces and Brettanomyces (as long as the size reference bar is accurate).