Shen Le felt his training was taking far too long. Every day, he burned with anxiety, afraid the bamboo slips could not wait, afraid they would rot, afraid the Dragon Lord would become too exhausted to hold on...
But Professor Hu's graduate students were burning incense and praying every day, begging Shen Le to slow down, then slow down some more. Were you kidding? They could barely keep up with the bacterial cultures!
Bacterial isolation and culture, quantitative fluorescence PCR, DGGE, and Biolog ecological microplates (Biolog-ECO plates)...
Each of these techniques sounded like nothing more than a term, but every term represented three months, six months, or even longer spent toiling away in the laboratory-
In fact, for a batch of bamboo slips like this, the research involved in writing "A Preliminary Investigation into Microbial Diversity and Function During Waterlogged Storage" would already be enough to support a master's thesis!
Professor Hu mobilized all his graduate students and even borrowed a few from other supervisors. Only by dividing up the work and tackling it simultaneously did they finish the project before Shen Le fished out the bamboo slips.
Of course, Shen Le provided generous research funding and allowances. With their supervisor's authority added to the mix, the penniless students squeezed out time to earn this extra money even when they were exhausted, and could publish a few papers along the way:
What? You said someone had already written about this topic?
Someone had analyzed the microbes on the bamboo slips from the Laoguanshan Han Tomb, but did that mean a preservation analysis of the Zoumalou Bamboo Slips had no value?
The Yunmeng Mountain Bamboo Slips were a new discovery, and their site was in the foothills of the Taihang Mountains, north of the Qin Mountains-Huai River line. Their microbial communities