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October 1, 2024

To our yeast research community members and friends:

I find myself once again having to defend our company against click-baity headlines about “toxic” or “bad” agar. Despite my sincere and comprehensive efforts to provide accurate context for journalists, there does not appear to be interest in relaying that information to you through their “articles”. While I trust that researchers growing yeast will see these headlines for what they are, incomplete at best and incendiary at worst, I hope you will continue reading for information I believe is important to know.

We have an excellent relationship with our agar supplier. Their teams worldwide have gone above and beyond anything I could have asked for with respect to sharing their quality control data and procedures with us. They are one of a small handful of companies in the world who purify agar, and a wide variety of vendors buy and repackage their agar under different brand names. There are hundreds of kilograms of each batch of well-tested agar on the market, and it is used for successfully growing a wide range of bacteria, yeast, and other organisms.

I believe it is essential to understand the following:

In our 19 years, we know of only two customers who have experienced trouble with any of our agar-containing products. One in 2006, and one earlier this year. As soon as the recent issue was reported to us, we proactively followed up with other S. pombe customers who ordered the same batch of agar, and found they did NOT experience toxicity. The majority of our customers work with S. cerevisiae, and while we do not have the capacity to follow up with each one directly, I know we would have heard from them if they were having problems.

Our lab has still been unable to duplicate any agar toxicity, with either S. cerevisiae or S. pombe, on either rich or defined media. Whatever this phenomenon is, it is both specific and elusive.

Even if you order agar from somewhere else, and “it works”, you cannot be guaranteed it is different agar. Even if you receive different lot numbers of agar from the same supplier, that doesn’t mean they are actually different batches of agar. My company assigns a new lot number every time we open the bulk container and use the agar in a recipe or as a stand-alone product. And while we will reference the original batch lot number for you in the future, this still will not help you determine whether your agar from another vendor is the same or different.

My company will continue to do the best we can to help anyone reporting technical issues with our products. We have always been 100% committed to doing excellent, careful, reproducible work for you. If you are having problems, let us know. If you are not, I ask that you speak up with your colleagues to help fill in the details of this picture so any issues with toxicity can be identified.

Lastly, I personally implore you to refrain from clicking on, commenting on, and sharing social media “articles” that do not offer complete information or useful context. Please help your colleagues gather scientific information, please do not participate in discrediting us or the agar manufacturer, and please continue to trust us as your yeast media partner.

Thank you for your support,

Liz Kylin

CEO & Co-Founder

Sunrise Science Products, Inc.

While originally posted on 8/1/2024, the text below has been modified on 10/1/2024 to remove the link to what was, in our opinion, an unnecessarily sensationalized and incomplete article designed to create fear more than to help unravel a scientific problem. -Liz

Is “Bad” agar just misunderstood? Can you help?

The attached article highlights an evolving phenomenon in the yeast community in which some batches of agar are causing toxicity in certain experimental situations.

“Bad” agar is not “bad” in all circumstances, and Sunrise Science Products would appreciate hearing from scientists who have seen agar toxicity in their yeast experiments. The more information we gather as a community, the faster a cause can be determined and the sooner we can begin working with agar manufacturers to encourage them to pre-screen for this issue.

We want to emphasize that Sunrise Science Products has not received any negative reports from researchers working with S. cerevisiae, either on rich or defined media, with any batches of agar we have used in our products. Also, not all researchers working with S. pombe are reporting problems. We would like to start collecting strain, media, and experiment conditions from any of our customers who do see agar toxicity in specific conditions, so we can add to the research being done by the yeast community.

Please send all comments and questions to info@sunrisescience.com. If you would like to see if we have other lot numbers of agar available from our supplier, let us know that as well. We are grateful for your past and continued support, and we will do our best as always to help you move forward with your research.

-Liz