Methods Flashcards
What do you mean by cuticular fungal communities?
Cuticular fungal communities were the fungal species isolated from termite cuticles. The term was adopted in the study of Rosengaus et al. 2003, where her grouped assessed the microbial communities in wood nest of termites versus to termite cuticles.
What is RBA? Why is it the medium of choice?
The medium of choice is based on Guswenrivo et al., 2018. RBA has chloramphenicol that prevents immediate growth of bacteria in the media. We know that bacteria can already grow after a day of incubation and hence may occupy the space in the media and would prevent fungal growth.
What is tween80? Why tween 80?
Tween80 is a polysorbate80 non-ionic surfactant. Jaber et al., 2016 used 0.1% of it to remove and suspend fungal conidia from arthropods. 0.1%= 1ml of Tween80 to 1L of sterile distilled water
Why did you choose 6th day as the incubation period before counting and isolating fungal loads?
The incubation period of our study fell under the incubation period of Rosengaus et al., 2003 and Guswenrivo et al., 2018. I believe that the incubation period doesn’t affected the fungal colony count since we had limited colony count to those fungal isolates with 1mm diameter.
How sure are you on your colony count?
For the colony count, we have followed the protocol of Rosengaus et al., 2003, that only those fungi that attained 1mm diameter on the 6th day of incubation were counted.
Why did you choose 20cm away from the mound to serve as the adjacent soil?
The choice of 20cm and circumferential collection of soil samples was based on the study of Guswenrivo et al., 2018. Both studies claimed that this distance had no presence of termites hence are parent soil, original soil or unmodified termite soil.
Why 6-10cm depth? What type of soil it is?
6-10cm was based on the study of Ganesan et al., 2010 and Guswenrivo et al. 2018. Soil profile/ type of soil varies depending on the environment. Usually a soil profile has 3 horizons, A, B, C. 6-10cm falls under the topsoil.
Why two tunnel soils?
The two tunnel soils from different directions allowed us to have more samples to explore and correlate with our termite sample.
Why 10 termite workers?
I believe that there is no exact sample population to be used in assessing cuticular fungal loads of termites since the population of termites in a colony is usually hundreds of thousands depending on its height and age. The choice of 10 termite workers per termitaria were actually adopted from the study of Rosengaus et al., 2003. Nevertheless, we should remember that termites are social insects, hence, termites are working accdg to their caste in solidarity rather than in solitary. Hence, these 10 termite samples may serve as a good representation of how these workers are functioning within a mound.
Why workers only? No soldiers?
When I was deciding on what caste is my target, collection of soldiers was of the choices. But on my personal experience po, I had a difficulty in collecting soldiers during my undergraduate studies. It is true that soldiers were vigorous enough to fight for their colony and they are serious biters. I do not enjoy anything that is biting me. Hahaha kidding aside, the main reason why I did not intend to collect soldiers is because of their population w/n the colony. Accdg to studies, soldiers constitute more or less 10% of the total population. My method is actually an invasive one and may cause further disturbance to the mound if the nest would not be properly protected against predators and enemies. As much as I wanted to explore fungal communities in termites, I also want to conserve them. Additionally, workers are the ones mostly exposed to the environment since they do the tunneling and foraging even allogrooming for the whole colony.
Why Ninoy Aquino?
tell a story
How sure are you that termites did not ruptured during the processing?
I believe I was able to check them properly before processing. I discarded samples that had obvious soil samples within cuticles. Furthermore, if we’ll go back to the statement of Makonde et al. 2013, the termite guts may involve Termitomyces, if a ruptured termite was processed, we may have Termitomyces in our isolates, but again, we have not.
What is the meaning of fungal load?
Fungal load is the total number of colonies from the culture plates, in triplicates.
