Weinberg Wednesday

Weinberg's medium is a medium used for culturing bacteria that was developed by Russian microbiologist Mikhail Veniaminovich Weinberg in 1903. The medium is named after its creator, who was one of the most famous microbiologists of his time.

Weinberg medium is a mixture of various components, including peptone, glucose, agar and other substances. It was designed to culture many types of bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella and Staphylococcus.

Weinberg's medium is one of the most common media for culturing microorganisms, especially in laboratories involved in microbiological research. It is also used as a basis for creating other culture media such as McConkey and Mueller-Hinton media.

Although Weinberg's medium was created more than 100 years ago, it is still used in laboratories around the world due to its simplicity and effectiveness.

The history of the appearance of the Weinburg-Meinke medium goes back more than half a century and is described in close connection with the biochemical aspects of the phenomenon of “acid-base” regulation.

The first to hypothesize the use of an artificial buffer, proposed in 1932. It is based on the idea that oxidation processes cannot occur without oxygen. In this case, the degree of protein oxidation strongly depends on environmental conditions and changes under the influence of buffer systems. Based on this, it was suggested that the basis for the ability of microorganisms to grow in the presence of oxygen is a change in the state of covalent bonds in the polypeptide chain of the protein. Under the influence of oxygen, the bonds between amino acids are destroyed, protein denaturation occurs, resulting in cell degradation and the death of the organism. The main criterion for the growth reaction, according to A.A. Kudryavtsev, and is a complex of acid-base properties of microorganism tissue (substrate). Following the concept of A.Ya. Galperin, which assumes the transformation of cells into osmotically active tissue at the O2 boundary, A.M. Weinberg went further and connected the growth of crops with the emergence of the so-called natural isoiolite (hereinafter referred to as EI), observed due to the enrichment of the crop with a new macroelement in an environment of lower acidity. In 1950, the scientist formulated the concept of EID as the physiological ability of living systems to increase the intensity of metabolism, transferring the cell to an ultra-acidic state, under the influence of a different, but similar in properties, macroelement. This reaction is reversible. The concept of EIZ and its nature were the link connecting into a single chain discovered by I.P. Dymshits' theory about the need for carbon migration inside the cell for the formation of cellular respiration with V. Kastner's ideas about the phenomena of intracellular starvation. This served as the basis for the widespread use of the Weinberg-Meinnke environment in research work and made it possible to discover the phenomenon of N.I. Mains in most known producers of heterotrophic respiration (B. subtilis, Pseudomonas, A. maculatus, etc.). The results of their own research N.L. Ivanov and M.