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I was told in my microbiology course that blood agar can be put in GasPak system (anearobic) to grow strict anaerobes, but why would someone use blood-dependent bacteria in this experiment as these blood-dependent bacteria will be aerobes or at least facultative

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  • $\begingroup$ Maybe they wish to select against aerobes in a mixed species sample? The blood is just for nutrients. $\endgroup$
    – Polypipe Wrangler
    Commented Jun 2, 2020 at 11:42

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You can put any media in a GasPak or other anaerobic system depending the type of anaerobic growth you are looking for. Sometimes blood is simply added to media to meet nutritional requirements of an organism. I use Columbia Blood agar often as a general purpose anaerobic medium. In a collection of 100+ obligate anaerobes I am working with, around half grow well on columbia agar with 5% sheeps blood, and many of those will not grow on Columbia without this blood amendment. As an added bonus, I can easily spot certain common contaminants growing on my plates by their hemolysis paterns.

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Blood agar is prepared by heating the blood so that there will be lysis of RBC. Blood agar is mostly used to grow pathogenic organisms such as Haemophilus influenzae and Neisseria gonorrhoeae which cannot grow on other media.Neisseria gonorrhoeae can grow in the absence of oxygen. Haemophilus influenzae which is a facultative anaerobe also can carry out anaerobic respiration when there is no oxygen.Blood agar is very important to grow fastidious organisms, i.e the organism which is capable to lyse the RBC.

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