To learn to fight bacterial contamination, you first need to induce it.

To eliminate a hazard, it helps a lot to understand it.  For example, post-harvest bacterial contamination of nuts can be a serious — if (happily!) uncommon — health hazard.  To develop measures to combat that contamination, you first have to create the contamination in the lab.  There are liquid-to-solid transfer mechanisms, but that then requires the nuts be dried post-inoculation, introducing other complications in the measurement.  So a team led by University of California-Davis researchers developed a dry inoculation method. As with any method that requires the growth of cell cultures, the laboratory incubator features prominently.

Their paper is at ucce.ucdavis.edu.

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