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J Bacteriol. 1973 June; 114(3): 1319-1327
Copyright © 1973 American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.

Microflora of Soil as Viewed by Freeze-Etching¹

^a Department of Microbiology, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802

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.

¹ This research was authorized for publication as paper no. 4347 in the journal series of the Pennsylvania Agricultural Experiment Station on December 4, 1972.