Tues July 22

Today was another day of learning, lectures, and tours. We had a speaker from MBARI speak on ESP's, Environmental Sample Processors. They collect data from biological samples remotely and through DNA isolation and PCR, can identify the species and send back the information to a lab. CMOP is acquiring one soon! The data from these is not as readily available as some of the data from other sites for teachers and students to use.

In the afternoon we went to food labs to learn how microbes are being used for food research. We toured labs where cheese, beer and wine are being processed and researched.

We also had a lecture on microbes from Mars. There are meteorites found on the coasts of Antarctica due to the motion of the glaciers pushing the rocks towards the coasts.
Most of rocks on the beaches are meteorites, and some come from Mares. They know this from drilling in the rocks and finding gas inside and comparing it to the analysis of gases from spectrographs of Mars.

The interesting thing is they found tunneling made by microbes that eat inorganic material (the rock). These organisms look very similar to the tunneling activity of microbes from Earth. There was not too much to do with this data, but we could measure the length of the tunnels and compare the sizes of the tunnels.

There is fabulous food catered from the city of Corvallis Oregon everyday.