culturing

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The act or process of growing or maintaining a culture, especially of bacteria.

   Like a gardener nurturing seedlings, providing warmth, food, and protection so a living population can flourish.

   The culturing of these samples took place in a sterile incubator over several days.

   Successful culturing depends on keeping the growth medium free of contamination.

   Similarcultivation

   Note

   Unlike the verbal gerund, the noun can count separate rounds of the work. After treatment, several control culturings may be needed to rule out a false negative, and each one is its own test. When you mean individual runs, use the plural culturings. For the process in general, use culturing with no plural, as in the culturing of samples.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of culture.

   The technicians are culturing cells taken from the tissue sample.

   By culturing the yeast overnight, they produced enough for the experiment.

   Note

   The -ing form of a verb that always takes an object. You culture cells, yeast or bacteria, and less often you culture an interest in the arts or sciences, where it overlaps with cultivate. As a gerund it stays verbal and keeps its object directly (culturing the yeast overnight). Once it takes an article or a plural, it has become the countable noun.

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