Some Comments on PCR Results from Paul Talbert

November 18th and 20th, 2016

Thanks, Katie.

I guess I am relieved we don't find evidence for Phytophtora infection, but that leaves us with no good hypothesis.

I'll look forward to hearing about the bait experiments. Meanwhile, I guess we should try to think of other hypotheses.
 

So thinking out loud here, it looks like your positive control has about 16,000 times as much Phytophthora DNA as the healthy soil, which has about 4x as much as the affected soil. The latter difference may be within sampling variability/error. So there is no evidence that a Phytophthora is causing our problem, but we do apparently have Phytophthoras in our soils, since nothing came up in the water.

Assuming we get nothing of interest again in the bait experiment, would there be any point in repeating the experiment on growing roots in the spring when the fiddleheads are coming out? I don't want to chase phantoms or beat a dead horsetail (that was a fern ally joke), just wondering if we could be missing anything. You don't have to answer now; we have till spring to consider.