Thank you

Hi Francuois!

If you want to measure microbial biomass C and N You can check also here:

Smolander, A., Kurka, A., Kitunen, V., Mälkönen, E., 1994. Microbial biomass C and

N and respiratory activity in soil of repeatedly limed and N- and P-fertilized

Norway spruce stands. Soil Biol. Biochem. 26, 957–962.

greetings, bartek

Someday in the not too distant future someone will try to sequence the whole biota in a soil sample as Qin1. et. al. have done with the human gut.biota. I expect there are orders of orders more species of life in the soil than in the human gut.

Tsuji2. has a staining protocol that stains everything alive and a bit more in soil sample.

A Google Scholar search limited to the last 4 years for:

(stain | Staining ) (Living "soil organisms"vital fluorescence

brings up over 200 papers. Changing the words and quotations marks around will greatly change the search. Most have the goal of tying a florescent dye on to their target of interests in the soil. Some go for everything alive, some for everything that's ever been alive and then some fore fungi, etc.

A couple of other ideas would be to bind a silver or coated magnetic nano particle to the living cells if you have an electron microscope. Once either Ag or Fe are Oxidized they aren't going to fade out very much over time. If fading is an issue with silver stains Selenium, Gold or Platinum toner will fix that.

Almost all black & white chemistry works on silver stained images of any kind. Some of the methods are not too save to work with,. Mercury Chloride comes to mind, but there are work around for most the need for it.

Best wishes

Gordon

1.  Qin, Junjie, et al. "A human gut microbial gene catalog established by metagenomic sequencing." Nature 464.7285 (2010): 59-65.

2. Tsuji, Takashi, et al. "A new fluorescence staining assay for visualizing living microorganisms in soil." Applied and environmental microbiology 61.9 (1995): 3415-3421.

@Muller,

Dear, there are several methods for the estimation of MB-C,N, and P. In which, Brookes et al. 1985 a,b; and Vance et al. 1987 for MB-C  (Fumigation extraction method ) is quite good and simple. You may also try Ladd and Jenkinson 1982.

Good Luck

You can determine according to Ryan et al (2001) microbial biomass C and N of soil. It is very simple and practicable a method. 

Ryan, J., Estefan, G., Rashid, A., 2001. Soil and Plant Analysis Laboratory Manual. ICARDA. 

Good luck,

Best wishes

Thank you all for all the help.

Hi!

The classic references for measuring microbial biomass C & N in soils are:

- Vance ED, Brookes PC, Jenkinson DS. 1987. An extraction method for measuring soil microbial biomass C. Soil Biol. Biochem. 19: 703–707.

- Brookes PC, Landman A, Pruden G, Jenkinson DS. 1985. Chloroform fumigation and the release of soil nitrogen: a rapid direct extraction method to measure microbial biomass nitrogen in soil. Soil Biol. Biochem. 17:837-842.

And if you need a well-explained protocol for this analysis, I recommend you the Firestone Lab Group web page:  http://www.cnr.berkeley.edu/soilmicro/web/protocols.html

Good luck!!