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!