It has been two years since my soil sampling occurred. It was a major undertaking with wet, rainy conditions that required three days of sampling at different time points over 6 months. Today marks the anniversary of the first day of sampling. The final day of sampling occurred in September of 2016.

These soil samples have undergone chemical, physical, and biological analyses. I’m still working on the biological analysis to characterize antibiotic resistance genes. But I’ve already quantified antibiotics in these soils and will have a publication with some of that data coming out fairly soon. It’s hard work, but definitely worth it!

Enjoy some pictures from soil sampling where we had to plow down some corn.

Showing where the soil core starts (top of it) and you can see our hydraulic soil sampler behind me that allows us to take soil cores down to 80 cm or more.

Complete soil core!

Jack, my advisor, driving the tractor through the corn field to get to one of our sampling locations.

Putting the endcaps on a soil core.

Fallen tree that thankfully did not impact our sampling, but meant we had to go around it.

Very wet conditions…a small stream in the field.

Troubleshooting PCR reactions is ever so much fun! I’m discovering the difficulty of working with soil and working with different types of soil, then trying to isolate certain genes (DNA strands) from those different soils! The methods that others used for their water samples, or even soil samples, don’t necessarily work! So, for me to analyzing the antibiotic resistance genes of interest is requiring some trouble shooting, which means lots of different PCR runs and gels!

Not very good separation and bands are a little hard to see. Needed to run the gel a little longer.

Too many bands, but definitely nice run time on the gel to get those bands separated!

Looking better, but still not quite there yet!!!