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Making blue soup

Undergraduate student Tobin Hammer prepares a colorful nutrient solution for culturing micro-organisms in WHOI microbiologist Stefan Sievert‘s microbial ecology laboratory. Hammer, a 2008 Summer Student Fellow from the University of California, San Diego, worked on assessing the diversity of bacteria in deep-sea sediments from hydrothermal vents in Guaymas Basin in the Gulf of California, Mexico. His project involved aspects of microbial ecology, cultivating anaerobic (without oxygen) bacteria, and molecular techniques, and he found a high diversity of bacteria in the Guaymas sediments.
(Photo by Tom Kleindinst, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)