Lab visit, chip fabrication, and the ISME16 conference

A lot of things have happened over the summer, so here is a little update:

In June, Victor came over from Amsterdam to visit and we had a few workshopping days in the lab and office here at Lund University to discuss designs suitable for growing different kinds of fungi in chips, testing bonding protocols, and creating systems with nutrient gradients in the lab. It was great to get to share ideas and we ended it with a nice dinner out in Edith's garden.

During July we started the production of some new chip designs, which will be examining fungal traits at the micro-scale, and were able to document fungal growth in the micro-channels.

In August, I (Kristin) went to the ISME16 (International Society for Microbial Ecology) conference in Montréal, Canada and presented a poster about our latest findings working with saprotrophic fungi in microfluidic chips (you can read our abstract here). There were several nice presentations during the conference where microfluidics was being used to examines questions in microbial ecology. I especially enjoyed the keynote by Roman Stocker, describing their use of microfluidics to study marine microbes and chemotaxis in bacteria, and the talk by Johan Leveau describing how PDMS moulds can be used to study microbial communities on leaf surfaces. Overall, it felt like microfluidics is a growing field within the microbial community.