laboratoryequipment:

Researchers Create &lsquo;Day in the Life&rsquo; of Ocean MicrobesMicrobiologists who study wild marine microbes, as opposed to the lab-grown variety, face enormous challenges in getting a clear picture of the daily activities of their subjects. But a team of scientists from MIT and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute recently figured out how to make the equivalent of a nature film, showing the simultaneous activities of many coexisting species in their native habitat over time.Instead of making a movie, the scientists used a robotic device that dangled below the surface of the ocean, drifting in the water with a neighborhood of microbial populations and gathering samples of one billion microbes every four hours. Similar to fast photography that stops action, the robotic device &ldquo;fixed&rdquo; each sample so that whatever genes the microbes were expressing at the moment of capture were preserved for later study in the lab, where the scientists used whole-genome gene-expression analysis to create a time-lapse montage of the daily labors of multiple microbial species over a two-day period.Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2013/01/researchers-create-day-life-ocean-microbes
