Week 9: Final Stretch

This week was spent trying to wrap up lab work. I also have been spending time working on my final presentation and the paper. There were two runs of fish, an experiment with a new probe, and the final run. I tried a different probe, EUB338 cy5 instead of EUB338 cy3. While it did seem to reduce background, the probe fluoresced very dimly, and it was hard to visualize what was on the slide. So, instead I used cy3 for the final run of FISH. I may have gotten some pictures of cells with round seven of FISH. That is, they are probably bacteria, but it is difficult to be entirely sure with FISH on soil samples.

With last week's extracted DNA from the suspected nitrogen-fixing bacteria, I purified it and it was sent out for 16s gene sequencing. What we got back was pretty inconclusive, as the DNA was apparently inhibited. I purified the DNA again, and hopefully we will get definite answers about the species next week! One of our results was about a 95% match to an Herbaspirillum species, which is a nitrogen fixer. Hopefully that will be consistent with findings next week.