Culturing cave and hot spring bacteria

New Mexico Tech (NMT), PI/Mentor: Dr. Daniel S. Jones

During my senior year of undergraduate studies I worked as a research assistant at New Mexico Tech, under Dr. Daniel S. Jones (twitter: @geomicrobe) looking at extremophiles in the Valles Caldera and samples taken from the Frasassi caves in Italy. I started working on this project in early August of 2019, and due to COVID ended the research abruptly in March 2020. My PI, a few of his colleagues, and I collected samples from the Valles Caldera in Jemez Springs, New Mexico. The pictures of the field (below) were all taken in the Valles Caldera.

The Valles Caldera samples, and snottite samples from the Frasassi caves, were being isolated in a dilution series. Once an isolate was achieved the next step would be to enrich the cultures using techniques described Jones et al. (2016). In addition to enrichment cultures, we performed DNA extractions and used an R-package “CHNOSZ” (for more information visit https://chnosz.net/) to determine microbial dependency on temperature and other parameters.

What’s the difference between the smell of rotten eggs and sulfur? There is none.