Optimized M9 Minimal Salts Medium for Enhanced Growth Rate and Glycogen Accumulation of Escherichia coli DH5α

Glycogen plays important roles in bacteria. Its structure and storage capability have received more attention recently because of the potential correlations with environmental durability and pathogenicity. However, the low level of intracellular glycogen makes extraction and structure characterization difficult, inhibiting functional studies. Bacteria grown in regular media such as lysogeny broth and tryptic soy broth do no accumulate large amounts of glycogen. Comparative analyses of bacterial media reported in literature for glycogen-related studies revealed that there was no consistency in the recipes reported. Escherichia coli DH5α is a convenient model organism for gene manipulation studies with respect to glycogen. Additionally, M9 minimal salts medium is widely used to improve glycogen accumulation, although its composition varies. In this study, we optimized the M9 medium by adjusting the concentrations of itrogen source, tryptone, carbon source, and glucose, in order to achieve a balance between the growth rate and glycogen accumulation. Our result showed that 1 × M9 minimal salts medium containing 0.4% tryptone and 0.8% glucose was a well-balanced nutrient source for enhancing the growth and glycogen storage in bacteria. This result will help future investigations related to bacterial physiology in terms of glycogen function.