A major interest of the Stockton group is exploring the limits of habitability both on Earth and beyond. This has led to exploration of Icelandic basaltic tephra deserts and hydrothermal fields as potential Martian analogue sites with a field lab to measure ATP and conduct qPCR in the field.1 It has also led to the development of iChip technology for in situ culturing in the extreme environments of hydro-geothermal systems; this novel application of an emerging microfluidic technology is the current focus of research and our early career collaboration.
Our current work employs an in
situ culturing platform, known
as the isolation chip, or the ichip.
The ichip is an agarose gel based
microbial trapping technique;
whereby, microbial samples are
taken directly from a field sample,
diluted and inoculated into the
agarose matrix. As shown in figure 1,
the collected microbes, once placed
back into their site of origin, are provided
with the natural conditions and nutrients which
are accustomed to by means of a set of
semi-permeable membranes. This platform
allows for culturing of microbes which
dedication fo optimize grown for in the lab
After an incubation period, wells that were inoculated with
a single cell produce a monocolony, which can be
extracted and studied in depth, in ways that would be
impossible for a field sample containing various
amounts of microbes of unknown taxa.