David Esteban

No its not biohazardous. You can put it in the regular trash or scrape it back out and return it to the source.

Good luck Maria! I tweeted and posted on facebook so hopefully that will draw some more donors!

Hi Kathryn. Good questions. If I chloroform extract before filtration, I'd get mixed cellular and viral DNA. There would be so much cellular DNA that upon sequencing only a very small percentage would be the viral sequences that we want. Filtation will remove the cells leaving only viruses. The other issue would be that the concentration of DNA in that volume would be quite low so any attempt to precipitate the DNA would have extremely low yield. PEG works in a slightly different way than precipitation so it works even with low concentrations of virus particles. The the filter is a srerivex syringe filter.

Thanks! I recently got a new camera with a macro lens through the college's technology fund. I've been very happy with the detail I can get with it and I can see things that I cant resolve just by eye. It also makes a good record of each column.

My plan is to extract virus from 200g samples, so thats one sample from the top and one from the bottom, per column. We have three columns.

Most have awesome names like AN-15 or T4. But as citizen science has taken off in phage discovery, people are getting creative with names. Like "PhastnPhurious" or "WhiteTiger." Maybe Cliftonator?

Hi David. We will use Illumina sequencing. RNA is a little trickier, and I havent tried to isolate RNA from viral preps, but would, in theory, be doable. Doing that is a future goal but since (as far as we know) DNA viruses seem to dominate soil viral communities, we are targeting this larger population first. -Cheers

Im not sure how well it would fare in the mail! (Nor do I know if there are rules about sending mud across state lines!) But I can write up a Lab Note on how to make your own Winogradsky column...it would probably be more fun to see one develop using your own local source of mud!

Hi Jason - yeah, Id be interested in knowing that too! Environmental virology is quite a bit behind environmental microbiology, where projects like the Earth Microbiome Project are surveying ecosystems across the globe to understand bacterial diversity. I think eventually we'll see an Earth Virome Project. I expect that viral diversity will be highly influenced by the types of bacteria present, and we do know that there is a lot of bacterial variation between samples from similar ecosystems, so the same should be true for viruses. Different ecosystems, like desert vs forest will be very different in their microbial and viral communities. I'll be collecting samples from a local pond, then using that sediment to prepare the Winogradsky columns to enrich for certain bacteria and their viruses. I can manipulate the conditions in the Winogradsky column so eventually I can start looking at the environmental factors that govern viral and bacterial diversity.

I saw Maggie and the rest of the Barefoot Monkeys perform their fire show on saturday. An amazing show with juggling torches, flaming hula-hoops, and acrobatics!