pymig – Pymig

To boldly go where no man has gone before

In a previous post, we discussed that anaerobic fungi need anaerobic conditions to thrive. Here I will tell you a little bit about the natural habitat of our fungi.

What do you think: where on earth could we find basically oxygen-free places thriving with anaerobic fungi? Down in the deepest, darkest caves maybe? Or on the very bottom of the ocean? Definitely some exotic, mysterious, unexplored corner of the earth that can only be reached by carefully planned expeditions with all sorts of futuristic equipment, right?

Well, unfortunately not. Or at least – not that we know of. Yet. And until we have the time and money to find and explore those mysterious places, we stick to the one anaerobic habitat that is commonly found and a little bit more accessible: the gut.

In the case of our fungi, it is more specifically the gut of herbivorous animals like cows, sheep, goats, deer, etc. Why herbivores? Stay tuned and find out in my next post 😉

Until then, here is a collection of animals that harbor anaerobic fungi in their guts:

Floof balls microscopy

Some of our anaerobic fungi can form big fluffy biomass spheres when grown in the lab. Those spheres can indeed become quite a problem considering their size and that we usually transfer our fungi from serum bottle to serum bottle by injection with needles and syringes.

Despite this, I personally love our little floof balls of fungi very much. Who couldn’t love them – look how cute they are!

Together with our awesome master student Leonie we also looked at the floof balls under a stereomicroscope. Check out the different stages of floof below: from cell cluster, to dandelion, to full-on floof ball.

Cell cluster: sporangia inside, hyphae outside

Jack of all trades, and master of some

As a researcher, especially as a Ph.D. student, you are most literally a jack of all trades, and – at least in the beginning – a master of none. You are a reader, detective, lab rat, data analyst, graphic designer, author, supervisee, and supervisor all at once. And, of course, you are expected to excel in all those areas. Whew, that’s a lot of pressure, right?!

The bright side of that system? While you will always be a jack of all trades, you can become the master of some. And, on your way to mastery, you will inevitably pick up one or two unique extra skills. Some of them might be useful, others not so much.

Here is one of my useless skills:

I am Julia Bottlehand. Master of making only one trip from the incubator to the laminar flow cabinet. And what is your superpower?

Whoopsies

Have you ever done something that was – in hindsight – obviously stupid? That was, in fact, so obviously stupid it made you question how tf you got into a Ph.D. program?

Maybe you’ve unconsciously shut down all your brain cells for a second and found it to be a good idea to cool down the hot liquid in a sealed glass bottle by putting it on ice. You know, so it cools down faster. Or you simply forgot about the sealed glass bottles you’ve put into the 180°C hot cabinet to “just quickly heat up the liquid inside”. Whoopsie.

Well, it happens to the best of us. And I find, it happens more often than not on really busy lab days. Luckily, nobody got hurt so far by my stress-induced inattentiveness.

And while those moments are down-right embarrassing, they make for a good story 😆

Aneo-what-now?!

As you might already know, I’m working with anaerobic fungi. Anae-o-what now?

Anaerobic.
That means surviving and thriving only in (nearly) oxygen-free conditions.

In fact, oxygen is very toxic for my fungi; they can only tolerate very small concentrations of oxygen in their environment.

But wait, oxygen is all around us! How can you possibly work under anaerobic conditions?

Well, that’s the challenge! But it is indeed possible. One of the most important steps is creating a relatively oxygen-free environment for our fungi to thrive in.

We use thick glass serum bottles sealed with rubber stoppers and crimped with metal caps. The cultivation medium (i.e. the liquid our fungi will swim in) is boiled (which already removes some oxygen) and bubbled with carbon dioxide (CO2), to ensure anaerobic conditions. Transfer of our fungi between bottles is done by injection to limit their exposure to oxygen.

Check out the picture gallery below to see what the procedure for preparing fresh medium for anaerobic fungi can look like:

To ensure anaerobic conditions we first flush our serum bottles with CO2, then add the cultivation medium under continuous flow of CO2

(c) Pictures taken by me; the skilled hands you see belong to my colleague Nico 😎 You can check out the cool FWF-funded HiPoAF project we are working on here.