The use of molecular approaches to identify changes in soil microbial communities during storage

The purpose of this project is to identify the time interval during storage in which the greatest change in microbial community within soil samples of varying soil types occur. Three storage conditions, air drying, 4° C, and −20°C will be tested, and DNA extracted from stored soil at time intervals of 0, 1, 2, 4, 7, and 14 days. the extracted DNA will undergo PCR to amplify the v3 region of the 16S rDNA. The PCR product will be processed using Capillary Electrophoresis‐ Single Stranded Conformational Polymorphism (CE‐SSCP) on a genetic analyzer. The resulting microbial community fingerprints will be compared using multi‐variant statistical analysis using the StatFingerprint component of the R Software package. Comparisons will be made to determine the time interval that undergoes the most change as well as the storage condition that produced the most change overall. Detailed results will be presented. This project is funded by The NASA Nebraska Fellowship Grant.