Routine Culturing: Supports growth and maintenance of nonfastidious bacteria (e.g., Escherichia coli, Salmonella enterica, Bacillus subtilis).

Colony Isolation and Purification: Used for streaking to obtain single colonies for pure cultures.

CFU Enumeration: Enables plating and counting colony-forming units for viability and titer measurements.

Antibiotic Selection: Serves as a base medium for selecting plasmid-bearing transformants with antibiotics (e.g., ampicillin, kanamycin, chloramphenicol).

Blue-White Screening: Used with X-gal/IPTG and ampicillin for α-complementation screening in cloning workflows.

Transformation Recovery and Screening: Plates heat-shock or electroporated cells to isolate recombinant colonies.

Colony PCR and Sequencing Prep: Provides colonies for downstream PCR verification, Sanger prep, and minipreps.

Phage Work (Top Agar Overlays): Employed with soft agar overlays for plaque assays using hosts such as Escherichia coli.

Strain Storage and Distribution: Used for short-term storage, stabs, and shipment of bacterial isolates.

Conjugation and Mating Selections: Supports selection of transconjugants on LB with appropriate antibiotics and markers.