Long-term cultivation of N. gonorrhoeae in tissue culture.

The possibility of cultivating N. gonorrhoeae on artificial media aids its isolation for diagnostic purposes and microbiological study. Numerous growing media and maintenance or transport media, have been described, each trying to meet the nutritive requirements of N. gonorrhoeae, which is a very fragile organism outside the human host. During recent years tissue cultures have been used as culture media for a great variety of viruses and bacteria. The gonococcus has been grown in tissue cultures in order to study its phagocytosis in vitro or its sensitivity to antibiotics following phagocytosis (Thayer, Perry, Field, and Garson, 1957; MeyerRohn and Rohde, 1961; Rohde and Meyer-Rohn, 1961). In the present paper we report a study of the behaviour in time of gonococci grown in tissue cultures and the maintenance of some strains by successive subcultures.