Please check out our pre-print! It was a 3- year high school study. Partially crowd-funded by experiment.com It was a very fun study and I hope it contributes to Wolbachia research in some way. Help us amplify if you can! doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

Here are the 11 phages the Innovation Academy STEM High School second year biotech kids discovered this year.

Our FCS Innovation Academy students have discovered and isolated 17 Siphoviridae phages since 2022. One genome assembled and annotated.

Plasmid design scenarios in Biotech 1.

Wild stuff.

Happiness is no more plates to destroy.

Five months of 16S metabarcoding of bacteria in our large Winogradsky column. Nice ecologic succession and metabolic stratification is emerging. @oxfordnanopore.bsky.social

Nice Tiny Earth isolate producing an antimicrobial against Pseudomonas putida.

A lot going on.

Pretty cool stuff.

We set up our large (3') Winogradsky column in Sept 25 and have been sampling it each month, extracting DNA and using ONT 16S metabarcoding to track ecologic change. The graph below shows the first two months and the top 8 abundance families.

The lobes on this beast are pretty cool.

Sequencing day.

@tinyearthnet.bsky.social patch library plate.

This interesting beast is growing in nutrient agar in a culture streaked from a cucumber pickling culture with aspartame about 5 months old. Any idea what it might be?

Today a student of mine working on a project was doing routine CO1 screening of A. vulgare pillbugs against haplotypes. She had one come back at only 50% match. So she blasted it…

am going to add some chloroplast and mitochondria DNA blockers to my @oxfordnanopore.bsky.social minion 16S metabarcoding PCR run tomorrow. Seems straightforward but looking for feedback if anyone has used these before in PCR.

Rare use of the multi

After 20 years in the attic, back at it.

Gel from rt-qPCR product. Doing gel band extractions for sequencing to establish positive controls for deformed wing virus.

Biotech research kids successful in their Rhizobia inoculation. They will qPCR rna from the nodules to look at nitrogen uptake. Onward to tissue culture.

Flash freezing soybean roots for rt-qPCR looking at nodulation expression by Rhizobium infection.

Biotech Research student’s first rt-qPCR. Varroa mite housekeeping gene. Next up, primers to detect disease.

Injecting B. japonicum into soybean cultures to induce nodulation

A plant showed up in our Winogradsky column.

Last two days of our campaign. It's all or nothing, so help us if you can! experiment.com/citypillbugs

Last two days of our campaign. It's all or nothing, so help us if you can! experiment.com/citypillbugs

Our Urban Pillbug Project funding site is live. Help us out if you can. No donation too small. If you live in a large city and would like to donate pillbugs this spring, let me know. experiment.com/projects/urb...

I have launched a new student project on experiment.com and we are looking for backers. The project budget is small so with your help we can do some cool science. We are also looking for city pillbug donations. Comment of interested. experiment.com/citypillbugs

GFP purification

Keep reading.

Coming soon. Want to contribute?

Sampled the Winogradsky column today in 6 places and extracted DNA. Looking forward to seeing how much DNA we extracted and Nanopore 16S metabarcoding on Friday.

Changes afoot

How your email finds me

Colors starting to emerge.

Column is starting to compact. Water rose and we took about a cup to filter for 16S Nanopore metabarcoding. Some brown spots emerging and bottom of column getting darker.

Winogradsky column is go!

Almost done with the large Winogradsky column. We have some leakage but sealant should fix . The sampling ports went in well. Hopefully Thursday we can add our mud. 😀

Fly nook.

Getting close.

More phages.

Sap beetle #Invertefest

Sanity board.

I did 5 trials today using different Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue extraction protocols for pillbug heads. Also did a Zymo bead bashing for comparison. Overall DNA yields from Qubit varied per method (mostly nuclear DNA) but CO1 PCR amplicons were similar across tests. One sample did not amplify.