[Michaelangelica]

There's gold in that there dirt!

Scientist/entrepreneur searches for biopesticides
science and technology

By JIM DOWNING
Sacramento Bee
Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Next time you see an organic tomato at half-again the price of a conventional one, blame weeds.

More than diseases or hungry insects, weeds account for the high cost of organic crops, farmers and industry experts say. Weeds crowd plants, steal nutrients and cut yields.

Conventional farmers can fight weeds with a menu of proven herbicides. But organic growers rely on hand labor, delicate plowing between rows, even spraying vinegar -- whatever they can come up with.

It all adds to the cost of that tomato in the store.

If the price comes down a few years from now, there's a good chance Pam Marrone will have had something to do with it.

For 17 years, the Davis, Calif.-based scientist and entrepreneur has scoured the world for the biopesticides made by microorganisms that live on plants and in the soil. Marrone concentrates these natural chemicals into products that fight weeds, insects and diseases and, ideally, cut the cost of growing organic crops.
. . .
. . .
Mixed with that memory of insect devastation is a picture of dead ladybugs and bees after her father, out of desperation, sprayed a powerful chemical to kill the moths on the dogwood in front of the kitchen window. Her mother, a committed organic gardener, put her foot down.

"She said, 'That's the first and last time you will ever use a chemical,'" Marrone said.

Marrone's father went back to what's known as Bt, an early and still-popular biopesticide. And Marrone, a first-grader, wrote a letter to the U.S. Department of Agriculture for information on careers in pest management.

She would go on to earn a Ph.D. in entomology at North Carolina State, chasing dreams of developing natural pest-killers.

In 2006 she founded Marrone Organic Innovations, and by April of this year announced she had raised $3.75 million from investors.

So far, Marrone Organic Innovations has just one product, GreenMatch O, on the market. The all-purpose herbicide is approved for use by organic farmers in every market except California, where it's under regulatory review. The company is working on dozens of others, including many it has licensed from scientists eager to get their invention into Marrone's product pipeline.

Nice story worth reading in full
Scientist/entrepreneur searches for biopesticides | ScrippsNews

[Michaelangelica]

Ancient bugs made own fertiliser
Monday, 16 July 2001
lightning
Making nitrate - bugs took over where lightning left off.
Bacteria that lived on Earth two billion years ago produced their own nitrogen "fertiliser" in order to survive.

That's the suggestion of new report revealing a nitrogen crisis early in our planet's history may have triggered a critical evolutionary leap.

"Our results indicate that a couple of billion years ago, life had to invent a way to make its own nitrogen fertiliser because the amount being produced by lightning dropped to almost zero,"

News in Science - Ancient bugs made own fertiliser - 16/07/2001
I have seen reports of (above cloud) lightening 5 miles high and wide in the US mid west.
What does that do to nitrogen levels?

[Michaelangelica]

Why should anyone—person, ungulate, or bird—eat soil? And how do dirt eaters choose which soil to consume?
Why do plant-eating animals and pregnant or nursing women particularly hunger for soil? You might suppose the easiest way to get answers would be to ask people, since animals can’t tell us.
But if you quiz soil-eating people about their motives, they just give unhelpful replies like I feel good when I eat it or I like the taste.
If you press them, they say they think it cures stomach problems or worms or diarrhea or aids, or that it is good for them during pregnancy, or that it adds a good taste to food or masks bitter tastes, or that it is useful as a pacifier in a baby’s mouth.
These varied answers don’t identify precise physiological explanations for geophagy, but they suggest several possible benefits.
The six explanations most discussed among zoologists, anthropologists, and doctors are to assuage hunger, to provide grit for grinding food in the stomach, to buffer stomach contents, to cure diarrhea, to serve as a mineral supplement, and to adsorb toxins.

Eat Dirt | Environment | DISCOVER Magazine
Lot of theories in this fascinating article on the huge prevalence of soil eating among humans, animals and birds.
no one has pointed out that eating soil ivolves eating 90% critters and wee beasties.
Whole Lotta Bugs

Whole Lotta Bugs
An estimated 5 million trillion trillion bacteria live on Earth (and they have a combined weight roughly equal to that of the top three feet of France).
94 percent of them live in the top 1,300 feet of Earth's surface.
The bacteria inside animals and us account for just a fraction of 1 percent. (*90% of 'human' is a bug of some kind) Whitman's estimate reemphasizes the enormous genetic diversity of bacterial life.

Within the multitude of oceanic bacteria alone, he calculated, any given gene is struck by four mutations every 20 minutes. Though most mutations are detrimental for the bugs, he says, "this gives you a tremendous opportunity for change and adaptation to a new environment."

An alternative to pyrolysis??
Certainly our present method of disposing of human bodies is not ecologically sound or even probably sustainable.

From Bodies to Rosebushes
by Josie Glausiusz
For the environmentally aware, death is the final indignity. A cemetery burial can take 50 years to decompose and can contaminate groundwater. Cremation pollutes the atmosphere with heavy metals and noxious gases. Biologist Susanne Wiigh-MŠsak has another way: Freeze-dry the body and turn it into fertilizer.

From Bodies to Rosebushes | Environment | DISCOVER Magazine

How to Make a Desert
You don't need to destroy all the plant life you see--just rearrange it a little. Then let nature do the rest.
Schlesinger knows that the tablespoons of soil he and Raikes are collecting may help reveal a profound secret of the desert. If Raikes and Schlesinger had come to this spot 150 years ago, they would have been surrounded by almost uninterrupted grasslands stretching across the basin. Somehow the Jornada has since changed, and Schlesinger, Raikes, and the other researchers who work here think they know why.
In many cases, they believe, a desert is like a living organism. Like a cactus or a sidewinder, it needs parents to give it birth, but once kicked into the world it can grow and thrive on its own. Deserts aren’t necessarily the product of outside forces like decreasing rainfall, they say. Rather, it’s the internal ecology of the desert itself--its web of plants, animals, and soil--that drives its growth to maturity and stability. Nor does the transformation of a grassland to a desert necessarily mean the creation of a place where life is more scarce--only one where life is rearranged.

How to Make a Desert | Environment | DISCOVER Magazine
I wonder what the role of soil microbiology was/is here and how cow poo changed all that?

Are We Ready for Alien Bugs?
In a dozen years, NASA plans to bring Mars soil samples to Earth. No one is quite certain what to do with them when they get here

Are We Ready for Alien Bugs? | Space | DISCOVER Magazine
A good question, Safely locked up I would hope.

Altruistic bacteria?

Death and the Microbe
Most people think of bacteria as selfish individualists. But in many microbial colonies, some bugs gladly sacrifice themselves for the greater good of bugkind.
by Lori Oliwenstein
When times get tough, bacillus gets pregnant. Normally the common soil bacterium divides by binary fission; it doubles its chromosomes and builds a septum--a wall--right down its center, dividing itself in half and producing two identical twin cells. But when food starts to run out, and survival becomes paramount, such equality is the first thing to go. Binary fission is still the order of the day, but the precursor cell now places the septum closer to one pole than another, producing two unequal cells-- only one of which will survive.

Death and the Microbe | Environment | DISCOVER Magazine

Prokaryotes at the Gate
Bacteria, ancient members of the prokaryotic world, are striking back with a vengeance and we are running out of weapons to fight them.
. . .

Tomasz, however, argues that we need to rethink our whole approach to treating infectious diseases. Despite its intuitive appeal, Tomasz believes the scorched-earth, take-no-captives approach to bacteria may have backfired.

"Bombing everybody who resembles a prokaryote at the gate is probably a mistake," he says.

That indiscriminate practice just incites every industrious germ in the vicinity to develop and share resistance strategies.
Drugs designed to combat a broad spectrum of bacteria may be cleaning out your respiratory system, but they're also furnishing the hardiest bugs a lab for experimenting with resistance

Prokaryotes at the Gate | Health & Medicine | DISCOVER Magazine
Why arn't there more dead gardeners? If they muck around with bacteria all day?

Not long after Viking landed on Mars, the Friedmanns published a paper describing microorganisms living in the Ross Desert of Antarctica, in mountain ranges so cold and dry they were thought to be devoid of life. NASA had sent researchers to test soil there, in fact, as a trial run for Viking; they found nothing persuasive.

But the Friedmanns did, without leaving Tallahassee. Not in the soil, but in a rock shipped to their lab-- a small but perfect specimen of Beacon sandstone, as Friedmann described it.
The rock was colonized by bacteria that led a miserable existence. All through the dark polar winter, they would barely hold on, at 50 below.
Not until summer could they thaw, rehydrate, and photosynthesize, and then only when midday temperatures were sufficiently high--and only if, at the same time, water from melted snow still lingered. The Friedmanns called these creatures cryptoendoliths: crypto for hidden, endolith, meaning inside rocks.
. . .
Friedmann keeps a large collection of such death-defying organisms in his lab and studies them between treks to exotic environments.
. . .
Among the denizens of the extreme are thermophiles that love water so hot it would kill us, psychrophiles that thrive in places so cold, halophiles in salt brine so strong, and barophiles under pressure so high that we’d expire. Together, such microbes are sometimes called extremophiles, as opposed to mesophiles--creatures, like us, that prefer medium conditions. Of course, from an extremophile’s point of view, we are the ones who live at extremes. It is a very subjective measure of things, Friedmann says.
. . .
Friedmann has traveled the world looking for them, but the wretched of Earth do not congregate in places that humans find comfortable. So Friedmann has searched in deserts from the Gobi in Mongolia to the Atacama in Chile, and in frozen lands from pole to pole. He has looked high on mountains, and deep in the sea. And along the way, he has wondered: If microbes colonize such miserable habitats on Earth, where else beyond Earth might similar life-forms exist?
. . .
Endoliths have been joined in recent years by a number of other impossible life-forms, microbes that might also be models of life on other planets and moons. Earth is infected with bacteria more than a mile below its surface--the current record for deep-dwelling life is 9,600 feet. Microbes may live deeper, but drilling to find them is too difficult

Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places | Space | DISCOVER Magazine
A fascinating article. well worth some study
How are we going to protect all this life/diversity from us?

Lichens, Plants and Snail Poo

The harsh Negev Desert in Israel is strewn with limestone boulders, which have nitrogen-fixing lichens growing on them. Various species of land snails feed on the lichens during the night.
Once the sun comes up the snails retreat to the sheltered areas under the boulders and release their faeces down there. Research has shown that about 11% of total soil nitrogen inputs in the Central Negev Highlands of Israel come from the snail poo!

Nitrogen Fixation

[maikeru]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

Looking for Life in All the Wrong Places | Space | DISCOVER Magazine
A fascinating article. well worth some study
How are we going to protect all this life/diversity from us?

A wonderful lot of articles, Michaelangelica! I don't think we can protect all of them equally, and in many cases, we may never know what was there, what was lost, and what may yet come.

[Michaelangelica]

Originally Posted by maikeru

A wonderful lot of articles, Michaelangelica! I don't think we can protect all of them equally, and in many cases, we may never know what was there, what was lost, and what may yet come.

Yes, no doubt you are right
I wonder how we would protect this life if it came from soil from Mars?

[Michaelangelica]

'Wee beasties' on holiday ?

By Catherine E. Toth
Advertiser Urban Honolulu Writer
WAIKIKI — The postcard-perfect beaches of Hawai'i attract millions of people every year.

And it's no surprise: The state has some of the cleanest waters — and sand — around.

But that doesn't mean these beaches aren't teeming with microscopic critters.

While there haven't been a lot of studies done on Hawai'i's sandy habitats, researchers who do look at the inner life of beaches say it's a fascinating world of nature at its smallest and finest.

"Like in any animal kingdom, you have predators and you have prey," said Watson Okubo, Monitoring & Analysis Section chief of the state Health Department's Clean Water Branch. "They're all feeding on each other. It's a mad world."

Many of these microscopic organisms are less than a millimeter long and sometimes as small as one-twentieth of a millimeter. A bucket of sand may contain thousands of these tiny creatures.

Sand between your toes? Eek, it's alive! - The Honolulu Advertiser

[Michaelangelica]

New 'wee beastie' discovered sunning itself on holiday in Yellowstone National Park sauna

The team found the bacterium makes two types of chlorophyll, explaining how it can thrive alongside other species in microbial mats and compete for light with cyanobacteria.

New bacteria uses antennae to harvest light

Also here ( lots on genetics and how to get it without growing the critters)
ScienceDaily: Surprising New Species Of Light-harvesting Bacterium Discovered In Yellowstone

The research team led by Bryant and Ward found the new bacterium living in the same hot springs as the most famous Yellowstone microbe, Thermus aquaticus, which has revolutionized forensics and other fields by making the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) a routine procedure.

An old but groundbreakingly relevant article?

Light harvest protein found in plankton
9/18/2000

Light harvest protein found in plankton

Well written easy to read article here:-

Although chlorophyll-producing bacteria are so abundant that they perform half the photosynthesis on Earth, only five of the 25 major groups, or phyla, of bacteria previously were known to contain members with this ability.

GeneticArchaeology.com - Surprising New Species Of Light-harvesting Bacterium Discovered In Yellowstone (7/26/2007)


BTW
Save your drier lint for your garden bacteria

lint makes a great addition to your compost heap or worm farm. Apparently stray sweater fibers make a good snack for the bacteria usually found in these types of soil.

Not quite 101 uses for dryer lint - DIY Life

[Michaelangelica]

What's good for the soil is good for the plant[/color][/b]
BY JOSHUA SISKIN
Article Last Updated: 08/03/2007 06:59:13 PM PDT


A fertilisation philosophy is more important than the actual fertilisers you apply. Fertilisation is not so much a solution to a plant's nutritional needs as it is a strategy of ensuring long-term health, not only for plants but for the soil they inhabit.

It should be noted that "plant food" is not something that can be externally supplied since plants make their own food, which is sugar, from carbon dioxide and water.
What we can provide are the mineral elements that make leaves green, enhancing their light-trapping capacity while also serving as catalysts for photosynthesis and other physiological processes.

The mineral elements needed by plants can be provided immediately with fast-acting fertilisers or, a little at a time, with mulch.
If you mulch properly, the humus that is eventually created in the soil will provide constant mineral sustenance for your plants.
The best testimony to the benefits of mulch can be found in the classic book, "Gardening Without Work," by Ruth Stout.

"My no-work gardening method

LA Daily News - What's good for the soil is good for the plant

[Michaelangelica]

CO2 Effects on Grassland Soil Microorganisms Reference
Drissner, D., Blum, H., Tscherko, D. and Kandeler, E. 2007. Nine years of enriched CO2 changes the function and structural diversity of soil microorganisms in a grassland. European Journal of Soil Science 58: 260-269.
What it means

Certain scientists, such as Hungate et al. (2003), have claimed that the future availability of nitrogen will likely be too low to support large increases in plant growth over the long term, primarily because of their contention that when CO2 enrichment increases soil C:N ratios, "decomposing microorganisms require more nitrogen," and they contend that "this effect can reduce nitrogen mineralization," which they say is "the main source of nitrogen for plants."
However, Drissner et al. found that in their 9-year-long FACE experiment, "stimulation of enzyme activities in the enriched CO2 indicated enhanced C, N and P cycling and greater availabilities of nutrients for microbial and plant growth [our italics]."
And they go on to say that their results "support the hypothesis of positive feedback proposed by Zak et al. (1993), who stated that additional C stimulates microbial decomposition and thus leads to more available N under enriched CO2 [our italics]."

CO2 Science

Astrobiology Magazine reports that a team studying methanogens - microorganisms that produce methane - has demonstrated their ability to grow on the types of soil found on Mars.

For years Kral has studied methanogens, ancient microorganisms from the biological domain Archaea, as potential candidates for what life might look like on Mars.
At first glance, Mars appears unfriendly toward most life forms. The planet currently contains no detectable organic matter and has extremely cold surface temperatures.
However, methanogens seem to be a potential candidate for what life on Mars might look like -- they produce methane and live in harsh, anaerobic environments, such as the guts of animals, in deep parts of the ocean or in the Earth's crust.

Media-Newswire.com - Press Release Distribution - PR Agency

Isolation of Soil Microorganisms

Isolation of Soil Microorganisms
A Project for Elementary Grades

Title : Isolation of soil microorganisms
Objective : To isolate and count the microorganisms found in a sample of soil by the dilution method using aseptic techniques.

"Microorganisms carry out primary production in the deep subsurface, using chemical energy from rock weathering."
. . .
In the deep subsurface, where there is no oxygen, the oxidation of basalt minerals by water yields H2 gas.

Lithotrophic microorganisms, such as methanogens and homoacetogens use this H2 gas as an electron donor (fuel), and dissolved CO2 (from the atmosphere or mineral deposits) as an electron acceptor (oxidizer) to obtain energy. The products are methane gas or acetic acid and cell material.

Google Image Result for http://www.pnl.gov/slme/pnlslmeb.jpg

[Michaelangelica]

Glomalin
headline bar

GLOMALIN: A Glycoproteinaceous Substance Produced by Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi
MATERIALS AND METHODS for ANALYSIS
1Sara Wright and 2Kristine Nichols
1USDA-ARS Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory, Beltsville, MD
2Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory, Mandan, ND

INTRODUCTION

The following methods may be used to examine glomalin, an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal protein, which is ubiquitous in the soil and has been found coating fungal hyphae and soil aggregates. Because of its importance in forming water-stable aggregates and in soil fertility, concentrations of this protein are being measured in a variety of soils to compare soils of different compositions and/or tillage or disruption practices. Please refer to the listed references for further details concerning the methodology and results. For further information on glomalin, please see the Glomalin Information page (PDF) file, Glomalin-Soil's Superglue, Glomalin: Hiding Place for a Third of the World's Stored Soil Carbon, and other Glomalin Research at Mandan, ND and University of Montana.

Please e-mail Kris Nichols at nicholsk@mandan.ars.usda.gov to receive updates and changes to these procedures and/or continue to monitor the SASL Homepage and the INVAM website. Also, please let Kris know in your e-mail if you wish to be included on a list where ideas, questions, and methods may continue to be exchanged. In addition, if you have any improvements or additions to the current methods, please e-mail Kris so everyone can be informed.

Sustainable Agricultural Systems Laboratory Products and Services