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...

ecofriendly packaging using fungi

I think we've all seen the many styrofoam packing boxes that are used to stabilize products when shipping. Here's an ingenious new eco-friendly take on it using crop residues held together by fungal mycelium. Completely compostable when done!

score one for the fungi

http://www.mushroompackaging.com

(image from URL above)

Thanks to Melanie for pointing this one out!

Contact sports and microbiota

Someone did a study on microbiota exchange between athletes during competition. Interestingly enough they chose roller derby as the sport...

Bottom line - by the end of the match where everyone is in contact with each other the individual's microbiota are much more similar to each other. See the figure below - this is an ordination that clusters individuals together based on their microbial composition

http://bodyodd.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/12/17270650-roller-derby-skaters-trade-bumps-bruises-and-bacteria?lite

https://peerj.com/articles/53/  for the original journal article. Here's one of the key figures:

I can only imagine what this would look like for something like wrestling

Zit microbiomes

Can't help but love the title, eh? So these researchers did microbial analysis both of skin from clear-skinned students and skin from acne-ridden students. The main bacterium Proprionibacteium acne was present on both but when they did genomic analysis they were able to detect strain-level differences. What was different about the two?

P. acne on acne-ridden students: contained "gene islands" associated with skin issues. A "gene island" is a series of genes in the genome that are in the same segment, associated with some particular process, and are often times thought to have entered the genome via some kind of genetic event.

P. acne on healthy skinned-students had genes that had something to do with viral blocking (the secondary source I was reading was not very detailed on this)

current students will find the last couple of paragraphs in the secondary summary articel at Biotechniques to be interesting. Read it and see if you can see Koch's Postulates popping up

Here's the primary resource if anyone wants to follow up on this

Fitz-Gibbon et al. Journal of Investigative Dermatology aop, (2013) | doi:10.1038/jid.2013.21.

Tag cloud feature added

just a technical update - figured out how to add tag clouds related to my blog so now you can click on the tag that interests you and it will pull up all the relevant blog posts - cheers!