Paola M. Mafla Endara

SSS Soil System Sciences

The 2018 Outstanding Student Poster and PICO (OSPP) Award is awarded to Paola M. Mafla Endara for the poster/PICO entitled:

Colonization of a pristine soil environment – Microbial migration into micro-engineered Soil Chips buried in field soils (Mafla Endara, P. M.; Aleklett, K.; Arellano, C. G.; Bengtsson, M.; Ohlsson, P.; Hammer, E. C.)

Paola Micaela Mafla-Endara is a master student at the Department of Biology at Lund University, Sweden. Her interest of research focuses on soil microbial interactions. By using microfluidic and micro-engineered model systems (a chip that mimics an aritificial soil environment), she sought to understand how the soil microbial communities influence soil structure and particle aggregation. The poster details preliminary results of distinct strategies of soil microorganisms to access and colonize the microfluidic artificial soil enviroments, which contained different nutritional conditions.