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The Soil and Water Science Department of the University of Florida and the Centre for Clean Environment Technology of Bangalore University will offer a special hands-on workshop on analysis of nucleic acids in molecular microbial ecology. The course will be held on the campus of Bangalore University.

Traditional approaches for enumeration and characterization of natural microbial communities may not account for as much as 99.99% of the bacteria present in a given sample. Methods based on direct extraction of nucleic acids bypass many of the biases incurred in traditional laboratory cultivation-based methods. This workshop will focus on the application of molecular methods to characterization of environmental communities, and will address the strengths and limitations of these approaches.

Course Objectives:   To give participants theoretical and practical experience in molecular methods used in modern microbial ecology. Participants will be exposed to a variety of methods currently used in analyzing environmental communities, and will become familiar with the strengths and limitations of these methods. It is hoped that the participants will gain the experience and confidence through this workshop to incorporate these tools into their own research and become resources of information for colleagues.

Who should attend?   The course is designed for microbial ecologists and environmental microbiologists who have some background in molecular biology but little or no practical experience in applying these tools. The approaches learned in this workshop will be of interest to agricultural and soil microbiologists, environmental microbiologists, and public health microbiologists.

Course Structure:   The course will cover five days. Mornings will be devoted to lectures on methods, and afternoons will be devoted to laboratory exercises. Students will be provided with a notebook containing all lectures and protocols used in the course. Topics to be covered include:

• Purification of DNA and RNA from soils
• PCR: primer design and optimization for complex templates; identification of PCR artifacts
• Molecular cloning, and restriction digestion and analysis of clones
• Fingerprinting of complex DNA
• Introduction to DNA sequence analysis

Application:   Due to space limitations, a maximum of 15 participants will be admitted to the workshop. Participants will be on the basis of potential impact on their research programs or their position to transfer knowledge gained in the workshop to others.  Please send a current curriculum vitae and a letter of interest (including how the information learned in the workshop will enhance your research projects and training, and/or your relationship with research projects that will be enhanced by your participation, and names and addresses of three references) to Dr. Andrew Ogram via email (Biodiversity@mail.ifas.ufl.edu) or fax (+001-352-392-3902) before April 15, 2003. Participants will be notified of acceptance by May 1, 2003.

Registration fees will be Rs 2,500 for participants from universities and Rs 7,000 for industry participants.

Instructors:                                      

This workshop will be presented by the Soil and Water Science Department of the University of Florida, USA (http://soils.ifas.ufl.edu/) and the Centre for Clean Environment Technology, Bangalore University (http://www.bangaloreuniversity.net/). The instructors include Dr. Andrew Ogram and Dr. Ashvini Chauhan of the Soil Molecular Ecology Laboratory, University of Florida (http://molecol.ifas.ufl.edu). Drs. Ogram and Chauhan have had extensive experience in various aspects of molecular microbial ecology. Dr. Ogram received his PhD from the Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the University of Tennessee in 1988, and has been on the faculties of Washington State University and the University of Florida, where his lab has conducted basic and applied research on various aspects of soil microbial ecology and environmental microbiology. Dr. Chauhan received his PhD in 2000 from the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh, and has specialized in the biochemistry and genetics of xenobiotic metabolism and the molecular ecology of carbon cycling in freshwater marshes.   For more information on the activities of the Soil Molecular Ecology Lab, please see the lab website (http://molecol.ifas.ufl.edu). Dr. Geetha Bali, coordinator of the Centre for Clean Environment Technology of Bangalore University, is coordinating the workshop.