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Baggie collection this week?

So sadly, it looks like I won’t be able to come back to Minnesota again this summer. It’s taking much longer than I anticipated to score slides and time is really running out (is anyone else wishing they had a few more days this summer? I sure do..).

I was hoping someone could remove my bags from the ground sometime this week. I’ve posted a file with all the individuals who should have a bag located just south of the plant. I hope this isn’t a very busy week for you guys! The bags can definitely wait if that’s the case.

dataSheetMycorrhizae_8_12_2009.xls

I think Amanda should still have a file on her computer with labels for each individual plant. Coin envelopes were the perfect size for the baggies so hopefully there are still some of those left in storage.

Also, some of the bags may rip when you pull them out of the ground. To retrieve the membranes you may have to dig so you should have a trowel ready. You won’t have to dig more than 5 cm to find the brightly colored mesh with the membranes. Thank you so much for your help!

-Andrea

Finally, a post about what those purple mesh baggies are all about…

This post is long overdue! I thought I would give a little update on what I’ve been up to here at the Chicago Botanic Garden.

So to remind those who may have forgotten who I am and what my project is all about.. My name is Andrea. I attend McGill University where I study botany (with Allegra!) and over the past two years I’ve developed a very strong and deep DEEP love for life in the soil. Don’t get me wrong, I love studying plants, but at this phase of my life soil organisms (namely fungi) dominate. It started with an Introduction to Fungi course I took two years ago that involved a series of guided and independent mushroom forays and culminated in the production of a mycological portfolio. I then took a biology of fungi course that was much more thorough and only confirmed for me just how awesome fungi really are. Last summer I was lucky enough to have the chance to work as an REU intern with Louise Egerton-Warburton, soil scientist at the Garden. My research looked at how microbial communities respond to buckthorn invasion and subsequent restoration. I’m back this summer to continue research on that project and as well to start looking at the mycorrhizal communities associated with the Echinacea populations in the remnants of interest in Minnesota.

The main goal of my experiment is to see if there is a relationship between plant genotype and mycorrhizal community. At the beginning of the summer Stuart helped me select nine families in the ’97 common garden and from each family around 9 individual plants were randomly chosen.To collect the mycorrhizal fungi I use mesh baggies that have two polycarbonate membranes secured at the bottom. One of these membranes I will stain and permanently fix onto slides for the purposes of determining hyphal length. This will give me an overall idea of mycorrhizal density and colonization. Hopefully I will have time to extract DNA from the other membrane to get a closer look at who’s really there.

To install the bags, I basically wedge the bag carefully into the ground near the roots of select plants so that the membranes sit at least 4 cm below the surface. Over time, the mycorrhizal fungi growing near the roots will run across these membranes and have no trouble meandering through its pores. Little do they know that it’s a trap!! Around each plant I placed one bag and waited about three weeks. Recently, I retrieved those bags and I’ve spent the past few days making slides. I promised to post pictures so here are a couple exhibiting some spores and hyphae!

CoolSpores.jpg
(Image taken with 40X objective)

For some reason it won’t let me load more than one photo so I will try again later.

More updates coming soon!

-Andrea

mycorrhizae

Two files showing the design of the Echinacea-mycorrhizae experiment and the locations of the sampled plants:
designMycorrhizae2009.xls
dataSheetMycorrhizae2009.xls