Honors Program Theses
Award/Availability
Open Access Honors Program Thesis
First Advisor
Marek Sliwinski
Abstract
It was previously thought that microbes in the domain Archaea were only found in extreme environments such as hot thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean and hypersaline environments, but as scientists began to use environmental DNA to survey soil, they detected archaea from the phylum Thaumarchaeota in relatively benign environments including farm fields, forests, and prairies. In spite of their widespread global distribution, relatively few of these species have been grown in laboratory culture. It is now known that Thaumarchaeota play an important role in the nitrogen cycle because they can generate energy through ammonia-oxidation. To increase the speed of identifying new species in pure culture, a rapid method of cultivation has been developed involving antibiotics to decrease bacteria growth and providing a substrate such as quartz sand for archaea to attach onto. We will use a version of this method to start cultures with local inoculum sources, including the UNI Daryl Smith prairie, to determine whether archaeal species from Iowa can persist under these growth conditions while bacteria and fungi are eliminated over time.
Year of Submission
2023
Department
Department of Biology
University Honors Designation
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the designation University Honors
Date Original
5-2023
Object Description
1 PDF file (24 pages)
Copyright
©2023 Payton Hall
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Hall, Payton, "Monitoring Archaeal Persistence in Cultivation" (2023). Honors Program Theses. 703.
https://scholarworks.uni.edu/hpt/703