{"id":10,"date":"2007-01-09T22:49:12","date_gmt":"2007-01-10T04:49:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=10"},"modified":"2007-01-09T22:53:07","modified_gmt":"2007-01-10T04:53:07","slug":"where-was-i-femto-episode-20070109-astronomy-or-microscopy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/?p=10","title":{"rendered":"“Where Was I?” Femto-episode 20070109 – Astronomy or Microscopy?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got a chance to check out a bunch of my Gunnison Bay<\/span> anaerobic<\/span> iron-reducing cultures in the microscope.<\/p>\n

I did a “Live\/Dead<\/span> stain and took a look:<\/p>\n

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Here you see an image from the Hubble Space telescope of a nebula called…oh, wait, that’s from the microscope. Never mind.<\/p>\n

These are the (allegedly<\/span>) “live” cells. The bright circles are out-of-focus cells – this is a “Wet mount”<\/span> with huge chunks (from a microscopic point of view) of iron oxides in it, which makes the sample thick enough that it’s hard to focus on more than one part at a time. The vague blur that looks like a gas cloud in a nebula is what you can make out of the chunk of what is more-or-less just wet rust.<\/p>\n

This particular specimen is from the positive control of my ongoing experiment (in what I estimate to be roughly 18% salinity, assuming my original Gunnison Bay samples were around 25-26% salinity). If you look close, you can barely make out the bendy\/spiral shaped cells almost in focus in a few spots. I believe that this might be the iron-reducing organism that I’ve been trying to isolate. In one of the other samples I checked, I managed to spot one actually actively swimming around, corkscrewing its way around the slide.<\/p>\n

I checked one of the experimental specimens that my hypothesis predicts will be growing at least one (and ideally ONLY one) kind of organism and it, too, has a lot of “live” cells growing on the rust-chunks.<\/p>\n

I think I shall designate this as-yet-unidentified strain “Bendy Benjamin<\/span>“…<\/p>\n

Other samples from the same place (but not subjected to precisely the same conditions) also seem to have some long straight rod-shaped bugs and some short (straight) rods also still alive in them, so even in the pretty specialized high-salt\/no-oxygen iron-oxyhydroxide-being-reduced environment I would guess I’ve got at least three different viable organisms that MIGHT be doing the iron reduction that I’m trying to track down the cause(s) of.<\/p>\n

Any questions? No? Does this mean you’re all ready for the quiz?…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got a chance to check out a bunch of my Gunnison Bay anaerobic iron-reducing cultures in the microscope. I did a “Live\/Dead stain and took a look: Here you see an image from the Hubble Space telescope of a nebula called…oh, wait, that’s from the microscope. Never mind. These are the (allegedly) “live” cells. … Continue reading “Where Was I?” Femto-episode 20070109 – Astronomy or Microscopy?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-microbiology","category-nerdity","category-where-was-i"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bigroom.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}