1. Growing Bacteria
1. Streak a B. mycoides strain from a -80 °C glycerol stock onto an Luria-Bertani (LB) agar plate, and incubate the plate at 30 °C overnight.
2. Inoculate an LB liquid medium with a single colony from the plate, and grow the culture in a shaking incubator at 200 rpm overnight at
30 °C.
2. Treatment and Sampling of Bacteria
1. To compare the growth curve of the bacteria treated with root exudates to a negative control, prepare a series of flasks containing 50 mL of LB liquid medium. Add 0.5 mL of the overnight bacterial culture to all flasks, and add either 0%, 5%, 10%, or 15% (v/v) root exudate or sterile deionized water to the medium, respectively.
2. Use a culture with deionized water instead of root exudates as a control. Measure the optical density at 600 nm (OD600) every 1 h afterward. Generate a growth curve by plotting the OD600 values versus time.
3. Dilute an overnight B. mycoides culture with 90 mL of pre-warmed LB medium to an initial OD600 of ~ 0.05 in a 300 mL flask. Add 10 mL of root exudates to the culture and incubate it at 30 °C for 1 h.
4. Use a 10 mL sterile deionized water treatment as a control. Collect cells from the culture by centrifugation at 9,000 x g for 2 min at 4 °C. Discard the supernatant, and immediately freeze the pellet in liquid nitrogen, then store it at -80 °C until use.