Harvard Forest Research

Microbial communities in the lichens at the Harvard Forest

Principal Investigator: Celeste Peterson
Harvard College (Harvard University): Sep 01 2009 - Mar 15 2010:

Abstract:
The Pringle lab has had a long-term study of the senescence of lichens at the Harvard Forest and the aim of this project is to examine the non-photosynthetic bacterial communities. There are two main goals of this work: to study how bacterial populations change as the lichens age and to determine how consistent and specific the bacterial populations are within and between different species of closely related lichens. The bacterial communities found in transect samples across the lichens will be analyzed by both culture-dependent and culture-independent methods. :