Week 4: Microscopy

This week, my project was focused around learning and optimizing FISH (fluorescent in situ hybridization) microscopy. The plan is to look at a number of soil samples from Antarctica using this technique. If successful, the bacteria in these soils will fluoresce and we will be able to take pictures of them. FISH is somewhat tricky, as the procedure takes nearly a full day, and there are a lot of important steps to get right. We also spent several days making buffers and staining bacteria to get the right concentration of the fluorescent stain DAPI. Despite some setbacks in setting up the FISH slide on Friday, the procedure seemed successful! We will hopefully be taking pictures of the soils this Tuesday.

 

I have a couple of ongoing projects that I have been spending time on as well. I am attempting to obtain pure cultures for several of the bacterial strains, which means performing microscopy to verify if the culture looks pure and then subculturing as necessary. This is a lengthy process because the bacteria grow slowly, taking weeks to show individual colonies. We have also been trying to isolate a suspected nitrogen-fixing bacteria found in one of the caves, by growing it in a microaerobic environment.

 

There are several things in the lab that I am working on at the same time, and I am excited to see how things turn out!