How will they live if they open the refrigerator at home and find a meat soup that has been forgotten for days, which has turned a bluish tone as a result of poor condition. This happened last March in America to a woman named Elaine Beckett, but besides that she is a microbiologist, something that ‘compelled’ her to study this curious case.
After commenting on it on Twitter and making it public, hundreds of people — many of them scientists, biologists, microbiologists, etc. — began speculating about what might be causing that color in the meat soup.
“Okay, I’m giving myself up here, but forgot the beef soup we just cleaned out of our fridge and it was blue?!?!? (…) All my years in the astral also with[biologÃa] I’m not handling it well,” Beckett admitted via the social network.
Indisputable result
The response of many of them was to actively cooperate with Beckett himself, who collected many samples of the soup with culture swabs and sent the samples to the many parts of the country from which he was contacted.
They then allowed the crops to thrive in different contexts and temperatures (between 4ºC and 37ºC) to see what happened and after a month of work the researchers came up with an answer.
The results showed that 75% of the genetic material corresponded to bacteria of the genus Pseudomonas, although everything indicated that they were several species of this category, apart from finding traces of Enterobacter and Lactobacillus.
But it did not stop there, because during the month of April, new results obtained in a laboratory reached Becket, and the results indicated that the culprit of the blue tone was the bacterium Serratia quinivorans, as it is capable of secreting pigment. The blue, called indigodin, would explain the blue color of the soup. Case closed.
