In 2019, a mysterious shape appeared on a petri dish in a Birmingham lab. Its surprising appearance, similar to noodles, intrigued researchers to find out more about it. They consulted other scientists online at the time, which sparked an idea to start an online club dedicated to sharing laboratory contaminants.

Now, the team finally publish their research characterising this contaminant as a new species of bacteria, Kocuria rhizophila, in our journal Microbial Genomics. Researchers Rob Moran and Greg McCallum join Communications and Media Officer Lilly Tozer to talk about their journey from discovery to publish.

If you’d like to read the paper, you can do so by following this link: https://microb.io/47L8aoY

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You can download a full, auto generated transcript of the podcast here: https://microb.io/3J6DUf3

The Kocurious case of Noodlococcus: From discovery to community

The Microbiology Society is a membership organisation for scientists who work in all areas of microbiology.