Almost a month since my last post. It has been a crucial month of accomplishing tasks, post-conference. Stepping a bit back, the conference was beneficial. One particular session on Integrating Omics and Geochemical Knowledge to Explore Soil Microbial Community and Nutrient Dynamics was of relevance to my current and future work. The session had informative presentation on empirical and/or modeling studies that integrate findings from omics application to soil biogeochemistry. Using soil microbial ecology to enhance predictive ability of ecosystem services and functioning with respect to future climate change scenarios is the research area I want to direct my attention towards. Hopeful about some collaborations that resulted in this meeting!
In other news from Biosphere 2, I was the presenter on one of the What If series at B2. Titled "The life that thrives under our feet", this 5 minute presentation was tailored to introduce the concept of microbes in soil. The ideas ranged from how many are there (we may never know!), to what they do. Using very simple words, I presented the concepts before the groups went out to tour Biosphere. I remided them that it is the International Year of Soils and we truly owe our existence to soils. I have included some photographs of the day in this post. I also had a table set up to show how we sample soil microbes, and even without going into fancy study tools, we can detect their presence. The Bill Buckmaster radio show also had a 10-minute segment about the series, especially about November and the LEO/soil/water work. You can listen (from minute 46:20 to 55:20, last quarter of the hour-long program) here: http://www.buckmastershow.com/2015/11/03/buckmaster-show-1132015-answering-the-big-what-if-questions-at-biosphere-2/
In other news, the honors student that I was mentoring finished his internship period and successfully presented his results to a wider audience. Also, I have been getting interesting results from my DNA extraction studies. Preliminary studies when correlated with the hydrology and geochemistry team, does indeed show hotspots of microbial life. We are in the process of doing some more analysis before we can conceptualize the manuscript.
Given the DNA extraction is going alright, I am moving on to standardizing reaction conditions for low DNA samples before they can be used for high-throughput iTAG sequencing. This one is going to be an interesting challenge since not only am I working with very low concentrations (<0.05 ng/ul !), I also have to minimize PCR biases and be extra cautious of contamination issues. I will report back on how that goes!
So long, for the love of microbes and soil, and everything wise!