blog moved

Hi -  as of July 2014 I have combined my website with my blogs and therefore this blog has now been relocated to http://adizzolab.wordpress.com

You can follow this blog topic more directly at the following URL: https://adizzolab.wordpress.com/category/microbiology/

This transfer has included importing all of these past Blogger posts

Blogger is a great tool but WordPress is letting me manage multiple things in one shot which is always a plus!

Talking fungi in Austin, TX

This week I am in Austin, TX for the annual meeting of the Mycological Society of America. MSA is devoted to research of all things fungal and fungal-like. Yes, 400-500 people all who love fungi! This year the meeting is held jointly with the American Phytopathological Society, so there is a lot of crossover with fungi and plant health. 

Google ode to Julian Petri

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/31/google-doodle-julius-richard-petri-dish-inventor

iI don't know how long they keep the Google doodles so check it out as soon as you can! 

Thanks to Janelle and Kathryn for pointing this one out!

HN meanings

check out this link

http://t.co/lxTHvqrYM3

A nice little NPR piece on the meaning of the flu virus strain coding, all of which should make sense now after our virus lecture material

When reading this, consider the roles of hemagluttinin and neuraminidase and the relationship these have to host cells

GFP expressing bacteria

Just too much fun to use the GFP-expressing bacteria. My new quest is to try to start getting a hold of other fluorescent proteins so we can diversify.

Pets and your micro biome

Interesting study about how connected your microbes are to your pet. As a pet-owner, I can understand this connection for sure! Microbes from folks within a family are more common if they have a dog than if they don't.

http://elife.elifesciences.org/content/2/e00458/article-info

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/04/18/177746969/bacteria-on-dog-lovers-skin-reveal-their-affection

So I salute our family dog Melky for the job he does in keeping our microbes consistent within the family!

probiotics for your garden

I can never resist. Bought a bag of fertilizer yesterday, intrigued by the ingredients. The product is made by Jobe's which makes a lot of fertilizers for your garden. This product was intriguing to me because of the "Biozome" formula - essentially probiotics for your plants. Below is a shot of the microbes listed on the label. A few things of note

• not very high cfu/g - compare this to total bacterial concentrations of 10^8/g in active soils. I guess the idea is that they will multiple as need be
• prokaryotes of note:
• Arthrobacter spp 
• Azotobacter spp - nitrogen fixers
• Azospirillum spp (it is spelled wrong on the label) - also nitrogen fixers
• Streptomyces spp - antibiotic producers, produce the compounds that give soils that "healthy smell" 
• Pseudomonas fluorescens (it is spelled wrong on the label)
• Nitrosopumilus - an Archaean - this was new to me, I've never seen any Archaea in these kinds of products. 
• endomycorrhizae - these are two endomycorrhizals commonly found in these kinds of products. Most of your garden plants would probably have these kinds of associations.  
• ectomycorrhizae - now this is where I get a little confused. This product is marketed towards your vegetable garden, but as far as I know there is nothing that is commonly grown in a garden that you would expect to be ectomycorrhizal. My guess is that this is part of a larger group of products and they just make one giant batch and package them up for tree health or garden health depending on the target (that's what I would do anyways!)
• here's a link to the Biozome product page: http://www.obio.com/biozome.htm. Not a ton of info on there 
• I'll give it a try this spring, should be fun. While it may be a little hyped up, the bacteria listed are all commonly considered to be plant-growth-promoting in various ways. Might be a fun project for a Micro class in the future to try to isolate all the microbes from this - at least the non-mycorrhizals...