Mycorhizial fungi and Web access

Rick Walker (walker@cutter.hpl.hp.com)
Mon, 16 Jan 1995 14:54:57 -0800

Jeffrey writes:

> I've never seen any documentation about
> symbiotic, or non-symbiotic for that matter, relationships between CP
> and microflora (fungii included). Do CP have mycrorrhizal fungii
> symbiosis as other plants do? Sounds like a thesis topic.

This is curious.

I just put some Drosophyllum seeds into culture. (0.5MS)
The sterilization in one flask was inadequate and I now have a baby-food
jar completely overun with what looks like pure white mycelium.

The interesting thing is that the seedlings seem to be thriving! They
are now 2cm tall with healthy red glands. Could this fungus be some
beneficial symbiont?

Maybe I should bottle it and sell it as a Drosophyllum soil innoculant :-).

Ivo writes:

> Wouldn't be possible to store the pictures of CPs also in some other
> form accessible for us we haven't a WWW account?

I'll see what I can do. The main web page is not on the internal
HP network so it is a hassle to get information back and forth. Maybe
I can automate this somehow.

Somehow each photo must be usefully indexed and kept with its
corresponding caption and copyright notice. The pictures currently have
names like: "0047.gif", and are only described by reference to a
modified copy of Jan's world CP list.

The idea was not to make a directory of CP "clipart", but to provide an
interactive database for coherently organizing a huge collection of CP
text and graphics.

We have 2 Gigabytes set aside for the CP database project. This is much
more than anyone would really want to download. We don't even have this
much space on the listserv machine itself. If you can wait a year or
so, we're hoping to put a snapshot of this thing on CD-ROM for
home/school use.

... Hmm. maybe I could run a listserv-web gateway here? The listserver
can be set up to run any shell script. I could make a program access the
local CP database and link it into the listserv. You could run it
something like:

RUN CP my_password CP_QUERY "Sarracenia"

This would return an html-formatted excerpt from the database for all
Sarracenia entries. Inside this file would be references to various
GIFS. These could be gotten with something like:

RUN CP my_password CP_GETGIF "0049.gif"

any comments?

--
Rick