TIL that Mattiedna Johnson, born to Mississippi sharecroppers in 1918, used techniques she’d used to make things like butter, jam and soap on her childhood farm to develop techniques to capture and preserve molds for research that eventually helped in the development of drugs to fight scarlet fever.
en.wikipedia.orgSubmitted by RedditPrat t3_126093h in todayilearned
Gee-Oh1 t1_je76ror wrote
I am a mycologist and worked several years in a environmental testing company, phase I and II environmental assessment and indoor air quality. It is amazing easy to collect fungal spores. Our field technicians would sample surfaces with nothing but cotton swabs individually held in sterile sealable tubes. All I had to do is wipe the cotton swabs onto agar plates...wait 5 to 7 days, the usual time for the imperfect fungus to begin sporilating, so I could identify them.
Oxytetracycline was discovered in soil samples near Pfizer's labs in 1950. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytetracycline And it is produced by the fungus Streptomyces rimosus. I have seen this fungus before and its conidia are unremarkable, they are small hyloid ovoids in a string that sequentially bud from the end of the hypha.
Her description of the conidia as "terrible mice" doesn't make sense. Rather it sounds like another fairly common fungus I've seen before that is not a source of any antibiotic.