2024年7月25日

索菲娅•布, 浩博体育app生物学助理教授在任何水域, 数以百万计的微小生物漂浮在周围, casually playing a critical role in aquatic ecosystems by forming the backbone of the environmental food web.

其中许多被称为浮游植物, photosynthetic organisms that produce their own food using sunlight, 二氧化碳和其他营养物质, 就像陆地上的植物一样. 但在过去的十年里, 科学家们一直在研究混合浮游生物, which straddle the line between the plant and animal kingdoms by both photosynthesizing and preying on other organisms.

是混合浮游生物 生态 迈克尔·罗斯少校，25岁, 远山, 新泽西, was on the hunt for this summer through a 研究 collaboration between the labs of 索菲娅•布，香港大学副教授 生物学, 杰克·霍尔特生物学教授. The professors combined their expertise in lake 生态 and algal culturing to identify and isolate key mixoplankton from local freshwater ecosystems — including Walker and Faylor lakes in Snyder County and a small pond on Susquehanna’s campus — with the goal of obtaining a single organism that could be grown in the lab to run experiments quickly and efficiently.

“Picture a pond and within this pond, there are millions of photosynthetic organisms. It would be extremely difficult to study mixoplankton in this setting,” Rose said. “Now imagine plucking a single organism and attempting to grow it in a lab setting. 这就是我今年夏天所做的.”

花了几个星期, 但在坚持不懈之后, 罗斯能分离出一个, unicellular organism that will be maintained in Charvet’s lab where it should reproduce indefinitely. Holt believes the organism they isolated is a chrysophyte called Ochrostylon, a taxon that can swim around or attach to surfaces and send out extensions, 可能是为了抓住细菌. 前进, Charvet will study the organism to better understand how different environmental conditions impact the balance of photosynthesis and predation in this mixoplankton.

“Our capacity to isolate individual mixoplankton cells from environmental samples, 从而获得新的纯实验室培养物, will allow us to develop experiments on their specific feeding dynamics in both the lab and in the field,夏薇说.

罗斯的工作很严格. 因为他研究的样本太小了, 他首先需要一个非常窄的移液管来提取样本. Rose heated the tip of a pipette over a flame until the glass softened. He then used tweezers to gently stretch the tip of the pipette, which elongated and narrowed it until it was small enough to suit his needs.

当进行 研究 在实验室里，罗斯说他觉得这“令人兴奋”.”

“Having this culture on campus will grant us the ability to test a large range of hypotheses, allowing us to open doors to better understand mixoplankton 生态 as a plant-animal hybrid,罗斯解释道, 并颠覆了我们对水生生态的理解.”

去年12月从浩博体育app毕业后, Rose plans to attend graduate school and is considering environmental consulting before earning his doctorate to enter academia.