Mychorrizal Infection Potential

One aspect of our experiment involves adding inoculum to the roof garden soils to stimulate fungal growth. The inoculum we are using is soil collected from a prairie. This soil contains fungal spores and hyphae that may not be present in the roof garden soils of our main experiment.
At the end of our main experiment, to see if adding the inoculum changed the amount of mychorrizal relationships, we must have a base line measure of the fungal growth of the uninoculated soils.
We are using corn in our MIP experiment.
The first step of the MIP procedure was germinating the corn seeds. We used certified organic corn seeds because we don't want there to be any anti-fungal herbicide on the corn. We used deionized water in the germinating stage to avoid adding any extraneous contaminants to the developing plants.

 Corn kernels half immersed in water.

 After two days , the seed coats began to split and the first root, called the radical, began to emerge.

Root radicals emerging from the seeds.

We chose the seeds with the most developed radicals for our MIP experiment and planted them in our conetainers. 

Planting germinated corn kernels.

At the end of our MIP experiment, we will study the roots under a microscope and score the amount of mychorrizal relationships between the fungus and the corn roots.

Mychorrizal Infection Potential setup after one week.