Loyola Undergraduate Research Symposium

After months of lab work and preparation, I am excited to announce that I will be presenting a poster at Loyola University Chicago's Undergraduate Research Symposium. If you would be interested in coming to check out the work I've been doing with mycorrhizal fungi or talk to me about it in person, you are more than welcome to attend! I will be showcasing my poster this Saturday, April 12 between 11:00 and 12:30 in the Mundelein Auditorium at Loyola's Lakeshore Campus. Plus, there will be tons of other cool posters by my fellow students as well! Hope to see some of you there!

Trust me, the new poster is much more exciting than this one!

Wrapping Up Root Scoring

It feels good to blog about the lab after a 2 month hiatus. I have had a jam-packed few days in Chicago working on the project. In particular, I have finished scoring all the MIP root slides for mycorrhizal presence. This has involved a lot of microscope work in a short span of time, but I am very glad to be finished so that I have more complete data to include in my poster presentation at Loyola University Chicago's Undergraduate Research Symposium in April. From now on, I will be working primarily on the graphs and poster rather than the bench top work that I had done last semester. 

Seeing the big picture of the different qualities of the roots that result from the soil has been really great to witness as I scored the slides. The difference in mycorrhizal structures between the soil from the Loyola green roofs has highlighted the variance in sustainability and health of the soil community over time. I feel that the results from the root scoring will be very influential in terms of providing suggestions for biotic sustainability, as there is a pretty clear difference in root structure between the different green roof styles and ages. 

This trusty counter sat beside me while I did my microscope work. It made tallying up the numbers of different structures at the 100 intersections much easier. 

Cleaning up some of the supplies and organizing the bench in the soil ecology lab has been another task of my brief time in Chicago this week.

 It has been such a wonderful journey working with the soil- from collecting it from the roofs to looking at the different aspects of soil health and gathering data. I am so glad to have had this opportunity, and I am very thankful to Dr. Chaudhary and everyone else who was patient with my while I have been researching. I hope to continue blogging in some capacity and provide more details as the research symposium draws nearer. Until then, I hope that this inspires you to look at the ground and consider how you interact with it!

Leaving The Lab, But Not The Roots

As the semester has wrapped to a close with the rest of my collegiate career, I just want to say thanks to everyone who helped me and expressed their interest in my work over the past 6 months. It has been such a great experience working in the soil lab and I really thank my mentor, Dr. Chaudhary for giving me such a great opportunity. I will be continuing the blog as best I can, even though I will no longer be in Chicago to do much lab work.

This week I have been trying to clean the lab and get some of the root scoring accomplished. So far it has been very interesting-we have seen a lot of mycorrhizal colonization, as shown by the high number of hyphae, arbuscular, and vesicular intersections that I have encountered in the first 10 samples that I have had the time to score. Some of these slides come from the newer, tiled green roofs, which is a good sign!

I will be continuing to work on this data for much of the next semester, so hopefully I will be able to share a bit of that. Until then, I will be taking a little break to celebrate my graduation from Loyola University Chicago and to plan my next move. Thank you for joining me!

Mycorrhizal Root Scoring

After wonderfully busy break, I am back in the lab, trying to finish making slides of the stained roots from the bioassay. I have around 10 more samples left to mount on slides, but I ran out of coverslips for them last week. In the mean time, I am working on root scoring.

The root scoring involves looking at the slides under a compound microscope and making a tally of the different structures found at 100 intersections of the roots. I start in the same location of each slide and then look at the structures present at regular intervals on the slide. In particular, I look for arbuscules, hyphae, and vesicles at each intersection as well as any non-arbuscular mycorrhiza. As the chitin is the part of the roots that actually stains, structures stained blue on the slides indicate that fungi is present. A really interesting website that shows pictures of the structures that I am looking at is the International Culture Collection of (Vesicular) Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (INVAM). It can be found at: http://invam.wvu.edu/. My first scoring attempt took a while and I am hoping to get faster with more practice and brushing up on the images found on the INVAM site.

 We are hoping to start by scoring all of the samples from the more "extreme" roofs, those that are oldest or youngest. The comparison between these should highlight some major differences between the mycorrhiza of different green roofs such as those that are tiles of sedums versus those that are prairie plant plots. The next couple of weeks will be a bit of a blur, however, as I have final projects and exams. If you are in the Loyola community and would be interested in learning more about mycorrhiza, feel free to stop by the 3rd floor of the Quinlan LSB between 1:00-2:15 on Thursday, December 5 to see a poster presentation for my evolution project on mycorrhizal symbioses!

Root Staining and Slide Preparation

Finally I have a more project-oriented post! As mentioned last week, we have stained the roots harvested from the bioassay. We used a protocol very similar to the following for staining:
http://tmemam.weebly.com/uploads/1/3/0/2/13027468/mycorrhizal_staining_and_root_colonization_protocol_web.pdf .

After following the protocol, the roots remain in the jar of what seem like pickled cassettes until I make each cassette into a slide to view under the microscope.

While the liquid is very purple in color, the roots are actually stained black, enabling us to see the mycorrhizae present. I then use the PVLG to mount the roots on slides, 10 of which are completed and drying for viewing. 

Once I have made slides for all of the bioassay root subsets, I will work on making slides of the sedum/field roots that we gathered from the roots in the summer. The two types of slides can then be compared. We will be following the intersection scoring method to quantify the mycorrhizae in each subset-more about that to come. 

I know you can't exactly see the roots on these drying slides, but once they are actually ready to be seen under the microscope, I'll provide some better pictures. The PVLG is pretty sticky, so the slides can't be viewed until the slides are in a more fixed position.

While the next couple of weeks will be very chaotic with the winding down of the semester and Thanksgiving, I will try my best to keep posting!

Busy Days

I know this post is a week late, but I am just providing an update in the meantime before getting back to the more project-related blog posts that I typically have.

In the lab, we have mainly been working on cleaning and staining the roots from the bioassay in order to mount them on slides for us to do counts of the mycorrhizae present when viewed under a microscope. I will provide the exact protocols in next week's blog post. I am also about to start a side project for my evolution class that will explore the evolution of mycorrhizal symbioses, which should be a very interesting and helpful bit of knowledge to have.

My days have been especially crazy as I am applying to graduate school and am working on polishing my application essays and CV, and I finally have enough letters of recommendation to apply! Last Friday, I visited Penn State University again, which is my top choice for grad school. I am looking to apply to one of the integrated biology programs there, particularly in either bioinformatics & genomics or genetics. After meeting with some really great potential advisors, the plot has thickened, and I am not entirely sure of which program I will be applying to. I am sure it will become clear with a couple more weeks of personal reflection and discussion. If anyone has any advice in the graduate school application process, please let me know.

Soon I will be able to provide some more root-related information! Until then, in the words of Thomas Huxley, "Try to learn something about everything and everything about something".

Root Washing

In the plus column, I have washed 35 samples of roots. I'm over halfway finished washing the roots from the bioassay! It has been quite interesting to see the variety of masses and volumes of the root systems. When looking at a plant, it is very easy to focus on the quality and size of the above ground mass. I have learned that the appearance of the shoots can be very similar, but the root systems of the plants can look completely different. Furthermore, their volumes may look very similar, but they may have a huge variance in masses. By huge, I mean a couple grams. This is quite a bit when the average mass of the roots remaining after the cassette's subsample is made is only 1.5 grams.

On the other hand, we are far from being finished with these roots! There are 25 samples left to wash. The remainder roots from the washed samples are still in the drying oven along with all of the shoots. Once all of the samples have been washed and dried, we will be able to draw conclusions about their composition. It has been pretty hectic for me, both in and out of the lab, so hopefully by the next post, I will have more of an update. In the words of the Dalai Lama, remember, " The roots of all goodness lie in the soil of appreciation for goodness". Washing these roots has given me a much greater appreciation  for the less obvious aspects of growing; all of the unseen parts are still a part of the big picture.