Sourdough Microbiology
Though Sourdough is a very popular bread for sandwiches and eating, how it becomes sourdough is a mystery for many people. Within this lab, students will grow sourdough starters at home to provide different conditions for their samples and then do some testing on it during in person work.
The idea for this project stems from the work currently going on at the Rob Dunn Lab at North Carolina State. The Dunn Lab has several sourdough projects going on and we were thrilled to help with some aspects of the Sourdough for Science work they are doing. We also performed some of the procedures from the Dunn Lab’s Wild Sourdough Project. We look forward to seeing results. We are looking to examine the profiles of the Sourdough Microbiota and how they vary across the Commonwealth and even within our own homes.
Land Acknowledgement
The Pennsylvania State University campuses are located on the original homelands of the Erie, Haudenosaunee (Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk, and Tuscarora), Lenape (Delaware Nation, Delaware Tribe, Stockbridge-Munsee), Monongahela, Shawnee (Absentee, Eastern, and Oklahoma), Susquehannock, and Wahzhazhe (Osage) Nations. As a land grant institution, we acknowledge and honor the traditional caretakers of these lands and strive to understand and model their responsible stewardship. We also acknowledge the longer history of these lands and our place in that history.