Last week Mackenzie Lynes, a senior undergraduate working in the laboratory, won a third-place finish in the Denman undergraduate research forum. She presented her work on isolating sulfate-reducing microorganisms from prairie pothole lake sediments. Congratulations Mackenzie!
Mike Wilkins, Kelly Wrighton, Dave Cole, and Tom Darrah hosted a press conference at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting yesterday (12-14-15) to describe recent shale research and results. This article nicely summarizes the key points that were discussed.
Grad students Anne Booker and Casey Saup recently visited the MSEEL site in West Virginia to see how hydraulic fracturing is performed in the field. Thanks for all the MSEEL team for enabling such visits. The opportunity allowed at least one inventive “O-H-I-O” photo….
PBS Nova recently published an article detailing some of the research that lab members are doing in collaboration with WVU at the Marcellus Shale Energy and Environment Laboratory (MSEEL) in West Virginia. Read all about it here
Casey Saup has joined the Wilkins Geomicrobiology Laboratory at OSU as a Ph.D. student, via the School of Earth Sciences (SES). She’ll be working with pristine shale core, investigating what microorganisms can be cultured from such samples, and collaborating with members of the Wrighton Microbiome Laboratory. She described the photo below as ‘the most majestic geology shot I have’. Welcome Casey!
Over the weekend Reb Daly and Shikha Sharma (WVU) were in Morgantown to oversee the collection of Marcellus shale sidewall cores from the MSEEL site. The whole operation was a success, and the cores are now back at OSU being processed – imaged, washed, and ground-up for DNA & PLFA extractions, culturing, noble gas analyses, and mineralogic characterization. Some pics below….
Anne Booker and Mike Wilkins spent a week at the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) in Richland, WA in July, using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) to track metabolite pools in bacterial isolates recovered from hydraulically fractured deep shale environments. They also attempted (probably) the world’s first high-pressure real-time metabolite tracking analysis. The photo below shows our collaborator at EMSL, Dr David Hoyt, loading the high pressure NMR rotor into the instrument
Here’s UC Berkeley’s press release on some recent work that just came out in Nature, describing the Candidate Phyla Radiation (CPR):
‘Unusual biology across a group comprising more than 15% of domain Bacteria’