6 January, 2003

Checking our results

When we returned from our last soil collecting, we immediately checked the many plates we have. We have lots of growth now. We find several types of yeast, some are red, some are filamentous, and some plates are overgrown. We just needed patience and the freedom to change our techniques until we found the right combination of soil amounts, the way to plate the samples and how to make sure we are capturing the organisms. What looked like soil that had nothing living in it, we found lots of yeast and bacteria.

Yeast!! Here are 4 different plates of Antarctic dry valley yeast. It is exciting to see the kinds of yeast that are growing here. Do these yeast colonies look like any yeast you have seen before?? If you have never seen yeast, you might want to get some bakers yeast from your local grocery store and look at it. If your teacher will let you, make a slide of some yeast cells and check out the yeast under a microscope. Then compare what you have with what we found in Antarctica. We identify these yeast samples by using a taxonomic key. Do you know that that is?