Week 6
Topic : Microbial Interaction and         Lithosphere

On Monday, the class is continued with the topic on microbial interaction. We learn about others interaction types ; cooperation, commensalism, predation, parasitism, amensalism and competition. 

Cooperation give benefits to both organisms in relationship but it differs from mutualism because cooperative relationship is not obligatory. Examples of cooperation are the relationships between sulfide-oxidizing bacteria and a variety of animals. Commensalism is one organism benefits and the other is neither harmed nor helped. Example of commensalism is nitrification which carried out by two different bacteria; Nitrosomonas and Nitrobacter. 

Next is predation among microbes which involves a predator species that attack, usually killing its prey. Vampirococcus, Bdellovibrio and Daptobacter are examples of predator where  Vampirococcus have epibiotic mode of attacking prey, Bdellovibrio penetrates cell wall but grows outside plasma membrane and Daptobacter penetrates prey then directly consumes the cytoplasmic contents.

Microbial predators.

In parasitism, one organism gains (parasite) and the other is harmed (host) while in ammensalism, negative impact of one organism on another based on release of a specific compound. Competition occurs when two organism try to acquire or use the same resources. We also have some quizzes based on this topic. In my opinion, this quiz shows how many that we understand about this topic and how we concentrate during lecture. :)

Before class on Thursday, we need to sign up for Voicethread and give comment on the video that presented by group 4 for flipped classroom about the topic microorganism in terrestrial ecosystems. Basically, they did a good job and they explore a new way to present their work. From that I get to know the overview of this topic before entering the class on Thursday. 

This topic is about soil as microbial habitat, microbe plant interactions, soil conditions and microorganism in the soil. Then, we have class activity in group discussion. We need to discuss about microbial habitat in the soil at different depth or layer. My group has find some article and video, and share it in Blendspace.

From this activity, I get to know more about microbial habitat of soil as we have to find some information from article or video. By putting all the information from other groups in Blendspace, we can have more informations about different depths of each layer of the soil.

So, thats all for this week.. (^_^)