Month: August 2015

Week 8 was another busy week! It started out with a visit from a group of middle schoolers who were at a camp at the experiment station for the week. We did DNA extractions along with running some gels. They thought it was pretty cool and it was fun to get to help teach other people the skills I’ve learned over the summer.

A few weeks ago, we picked some garlic that had come from a soft rot field. This week, we weighed out the bulb heads and counted how many would count as “marketable” to see which treatment worked best at fighting the soft rot.

Unfortunately, not many of the bulbs were ranked as marketable. But I did find one that looked like a heart!

We also inoculated some Yukon Gold potatoes a couple weeks ago with dry rot. We did this by cutting a small core out of one end of the potato and then used dry rot grown on agar plugs to fill in the hole. Parafilm, a stretchy, breathable band- aid like material, was wrapped around the wounds and then we let them sit in a slightly humid environment for a little while. After seeing some signs of dry (and soft) rot, we decided to try cutting them open to examine the inside.

 

Here’s a top view of the cored sections where the potatoes were inoculated-

Potato surgery in progress!

We didn’t see quite as much dry rot as we expected. Only one trial really showed growth of the dry rot outside of the cored area. The potato in the below picture in the upper left hand corner actually turned out to be suffering from soft rot. We threw the soft rot potatoes away because we are focusing on the dry rot growth. The soft rot potatoes also smelled pretty bad!

A new project that we started this week was planting a brassica plot.

I weighed out certain amounts of seeds such as different kinds of mustards, broccoli, and arugula. Then I mixed those seeds with sand that had been inoculated with verticillium wilt.

Now we’re going to see how the mustard, broccoli, and arugula combat the verticillium wilt.

We also found a frog!  He’ll be keeping an eye on the plant growth for us.

 

With the verticillium project going on, we’re using tons of petri plates and slants. These plates and slants are filled with mediums that have different levels of selectivity- the more selective medium prevents less things from growing on it than does a less selective medium.

The mediums are made out of a variety of different ingredients. They’re gel-like in substance and contain agar, which is kind of like a gelatin that comes from algae.

This day, we needed to make some more slants and plates. All of the recipes are in this handy dandy book.

The slants we made had CPA or Czapek-Dox Agar. This recipe was just for the broth, but we added agar.

And the plates we made were 1% Potato Dextrose Agar.

First I made the PDA. This recipe is pretty simple and only has a couple ingredients. First is water!

500 mL makes quite a few small sized plates.

Next is the potato dextrose and agar. The potato dextrose smells a little bit like instant mashed potatoes!

In they go…

And then the same general instructions follow for the CPA.

For the slants, we fill them about 1/3 of the way full. We don’t pour the plates yet.

After pouring the slants, we autoclave both them and the un-poured plate medium. The autoclave is like a huge pressure cooker and sterilizes anything that goes into it.

After the autoclave, we tip the slants sideways so that they melted medium gels tilted.  

The plates are made by simply pouring the medium into the empty petri dishes and left to cool. We do this under the hood, which helps to keep everything sterile.

From here, we have lots of nice, sterile plates and slants we can use for future use!

 

 

Week 6 was another busy week! We started out with spore counting.

This is the slide that we used to put the solution containing the spores in to. The silver notches are where you pipette the spores into and then they spread across the surface where there is a tiny grid etched in it.

After placing the spores on to the special slide, we headed over to the microscope.

Here’s a view inside the microscope! The very small grid is seen here. The smaller squares are the ones that we counted the spores in.

Here you can see the actual spores. We used a clicker to count the spores in each square and counted 16 squares at a time. These 16 squares are seen contained inside the triple white lines.

Next, we finished one of our experimental carrot plot projects where the  carrots were being measured for amounts of soft rot. We went through and counted the number of healthy versus diseased plants in each plot and collected the data to see which treatments worked best.

There were lots of diseased carrots!

We also measured and flagged some plots for future use. One of these plots is for more sclerotia measurement and another one is for mustard growth.

We used this tool, which allows you to see the view from left, right, and center, all at once through the three windows. This makes squaring up the corners a lot easier than using the Pythagorean Theorem and running around trying to make everything match up!

I also picked garlic that had been growing in another experimental plot and chopped off the tops, saving the bulbs. We will then weigh the bulbs and see which plot produced the most.

Beautiful blue skies!

 

During week 5, we got to take a whole day to spend in the fields! The first place we went was to a potato field where we talked with some farmers who were having problems with their field. One of the things that is great about this internship is seeing how the research is being used in real world applications. Being able to meet the farmers and listen to them and the researchers communicate is really neat.

Next, we visited two different peppermint fields. In these fields, we counted the number of plants that were infected with verticillium wilt.

The fields were both about 35 acres.

We divided each field into four sections and then walked six diagonal lines in each section to most accurately view and see all the plants.

The mint fields looked innocent from the outside but were actually quite jungle-like once we got moving through them. In some places the plants were knee high; in others, waist high!

Everything smelled very minty fresh. My shoes smelled like peppermint for at least a week afterwards.

At first, identifying the plants with verticillium wilt seemed like trying to find a needle in a haystack! There was so much mint to look through.

After a while, identification got easier. The plants with verticillium wilt were often crunchy and crispy looking like this…

Yellowed leaves were also a giveaway.

In addition to yellow, the plants also had a purple hue on the leaves.

Some of the transects had barely any verticillium wilt and others had quite a bit.

Some just had a lot of ladybugs.

Soil samples had previously been taken from these same fields so the next step will be to look at how those match up with the number of affected plants in each transect.

Peppermint fields forever!