Where to collect E. coli bacteria and how do you culture them?
What kind of E. coli do you want to grow? There are many, many strains and you use different ones for different things. The “generic” strain is K12 with the most common variant being numbered MG1655. It’s been cultured continuously for more than 80 years. It’s also quite harmless. Just ask someone for it or buy it from ATCC. If you actually want to isolate wild type E. coli, that’s a little trickier. Add any mammalian stool sample to MacConkey agar and incubate. They’ll make red colonies. You’ll have to confirm its really E. coli with other biochemical tests or sequencing. E. coli is quite happy growing in LB media at 37C.
