Please be sure to follow an accepted reference format such as the ASM format specified in the grant proposal assignment. In general, reread the assignment page and make sure your grant conforms.

Also, please give the budget a shot and suggest what agency might be willing to fund your work.

In addition, each group should post a report of their laboratory as soon as possible, for better or worse. Only one post per group is required.

A reminder that our second exam is on 4/27 and will cover all of the material since the first exam.

Your grant proposal DRAFT is due April 29th and your final proposal is due on May 6th in class.

thx

MGMT

Check out: http://microbewiki.kenyon.edu/index.php/MicrobeWiki

if you seek background on your potential microbial study subjects.

VC

To remind you, I will be absent on 3/30 but expect each of you to come to class having read the Turner and Chao, “Prisoner’s dilemma in an RNA virus” paper.  It can be found here: turner chao virus PD

As promised I have put together an introductory set of slides providing some background on the system and the experiments. In these slides, I assign each of you to groups who should focus specifically on one of six sections of this short paper. By dissecting it in sections, and then reconvening at the end to share your conclusions, I hope you’ll understand and appreciate how even simple organisms can play evolutionary games.

The introductory slides and group assignments can be found here: 713 lecture 10, sex and cheating in RNA viruses

Though I couldn’t find a legal link to the introduction to Prisoner’s Dilemma from the movie A Beautiful Mind, feel free to search YouTube for lots of related spinoffs and homemade tutorials. There’s one from Dilbert that is humorous, if not particularly informative:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED9gaAb2BEw

PS: Posted an article on winemaking microbes (both good and bad) on my micropopbio blog, which now feeds to the right –>

UPDATE (noon on 3/30): Your blog assignment this week to find and discuss an article on the evolution of sex will be late, and receive less than full credit, if posted after today.

For this week’s blog, please find and discuss a scientific report on the potential advantages of sexual recombination.  Please provide a working hyperlink to your article or web resource.

The microbial ecosystem inside the carnivorous pitcher plant is vastly more diverse than previously thought according to research published in the March 2010 issue of the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

Researchers from LouisianaStateUniversity used genomic fingerprinting technology to assess the bacterial diversity inside leaves of Sarracenia alata, commonly known as the pitcher plant. A pitcher plant is a carnivorous plant that lives in nitrogen poor soil augmenting the inadequate nitrogen by trapping and digesting insects. It has tubular shaped leaves that contain a liquid that is used for digestion. Over the past 35 years studying these plants using traditional culture-based methods, scientists have only identified 20 distinct bacteria in the pitcher.

“The microbial richness associated with the pitcher fluid from Sarracenia alata is high, with more than 1,000 phylogroups identified across at least seven phyla and over 50 families,” say the researchers, who studied 10 plants in a Louisiana wildlife management area for 5 months during the spring and summer of 2009.

The researchers noted as well that approximately a third of all the bacteria were unidentifiable. They also observed that not only were the bacterial populations distinctly different from nearby soil samples, they started out different in each plant but over time they became more similar to one another.

“These findings indicate that the bacteria associated with pitcher plant leaves are far from random assemblages and represent an important step toward understanding this unique plant-microbe interaction,” say the researchers.

(M.M. Koopman, D.M. Fuselier, S. Hird, B.C. Carstens. 2010. The carnivorous pale pitcher plant harbors diverse, distinct, and time-dependent bacterial communities. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 76. 6: 1851-1860.)
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/76/6/1851

To reiterate what I said in class, please prepare by reviewing the central concepts and points from each lecture and from each assigned reading.  Since it is open-book the exam will require application and synthesis and not just regurgitation of facts.  I encourage you to spend some time with the materials so that you will be efficient with them during the exam.

You will need to review and interpret some of the literature that I reviewed in class, ie the papers that I reviewed in lecture but that we did not discuss in recitation. You will also have to draw figures that illustrate concepts or findings, since a picture is worth 1,000 words.

UPDATE:  Here is a link: MLST lab to our MLST laboratory; these will be returned for your reference in the exam.

If you wish to receive any credit for blogs that you have been assigned but not yet completed, Friday 3/12 is your deadline for partial credit. To review, you should have posted on:

1) Sulfolobus and Baas-Becking
2) What the bacterial species concept means to you, esp. in light of MLST
3) Any topic in microbiology for which the species concept matters, to you,
4) Whether experimental evolution (microevolution in the laboratory) can shed light on macroevolutionary phenomena (like the Cambrian explosion)
5) At least 1 comment/post in response to one of your colleagues’ posts

best,

VC

As always, be creative. Enjoy!