Microflora of Soil As Viewed by Freeze-etching

Overview

Journal J Bacteriol

Publisher American Society for Microbiology

Specialty Microbiology

Date 1973 Jun 1

PMID 4123238

Citations 8

Authors

D L Balkwill

L E Casida Jr

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The indigenous microflora of soil were released from the soil materials and concentrated without the occurrence of growth by use of a blending-simple centrifugation procedure. The cell concentrate was then frozen-etched and viewed by transmission electron microscopy. Criteria were established for detecting microbial cells among the residual soil debris. The freeze-etching of the soil cell concentrate provided results on cell size distributions in agreement with those obtained by thin sectioning. However, the blending-simple centrifugation procedure for cell release and concentration from soil allowed the observation of large cells (>/=1.0 mum in diameter) which apparently are missed by the "exhaustive centrifugal washing" cell separation-concentration procedure. The procedure of blending-simple centrifugation combined with the viewing of frozenetched preparations allowed evaluations of the soil microflora for cellular diameters, length-width ratios, shapes, and structure.

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