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. 1973 Jun;114(3):1319–1327. doi: 10.1128/jb.114.3.1319-1327.1973

Microflora of Soil as Viewed by Freeze-Etching1

D L Balkwill a, L E Casida Jr a
PMCID: PMC285395  PMID: 4123238

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 μm 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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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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