UC Berkeley

The field of microbial ecology is hindered by our general inability to map microbes on a geographical scale. This is in part due to technical limitations posed by current DNA detection reactions. This dissertation presents the application of Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) for the purpose of amplifying DNA from pollen grains; down to a single grain and with a resulting fluorescence signal to indicate the presence or absence of the particular DNA fragment in question. Three academic papers outlining this method comprise the bulk of the work and are bookended by a brief survey of microbial detection efforts to date and future applications of our method.

Beyond technical limitations there are social and political priorities embedded within the biological sciences that are implicit in our inability to map microbes. Therefore, any advance in the resolution of microbial mapping must also challenge these priorities. In place of the centralized research conducted by experts in universities and corporations, and ultimately for the purpose of capital accumulation, we propose a distributed and horizontally organized mapping network antagonistic to capitalist biology.

Pollen grains are our choice of microbe because they are the vector of reproduction for flowering plants and thus an important source of contamination of transgenic DNA from transgenic plants. The growing rejection of transgenic crops across the globe points to a strong desire to identify their location, utilizing microbial mapping methods, and eliminate their spread.

The technical advances presented here, alongside our social and political commitments, aim to assist in that effort.