Kristina Bartowitz's blog

 So much to do and so little time left! This week we went to BAT to collect water and we were going to attempt to set up an in situ experiment in order to see if there was a major difference in grazing rates that we were getting from the light inside as compared to outside light. Unfortunately we weren’t confident that the bottles would stay attached to the rocks along the edge of the river and we didn’t want them washed away to sea, so we decided to just do a normal grazer experiment.

 This week the miniprep failed two times- we still haven’t been able to start sequencing at all. I mostly worked on doing cell counts from the infection experiment, which is going really well. I also spent a bit of time preparing for our midterm presentations next week. 

 This week we started the infection experiment and continued to try and get a good PCR and gel run to be able to begin sequencing. For the infection experiment we have 18 bottles set up- 12 experimental and 6 with dye as controls. Half of the bottles are shaken to simulate turbidity and the other half are not. Half of each of the bottles in shaken/not shaken have parasites while half do not. We will take a small sample from each bottle and measure RFU values and fix the samples to do cell counts, as well as measure for chlorophylls and nutrients.

 Every day this week I recorded RFU values to measure phytoplankton growth, and continued to update the growth charts for them. We went data collecting at five sites, and processed all the samples from them. I also measured RFU’s from chlorophylls and helped with filtering for DNA extraction. I learned how to acid wash, which isn’t that much fun. I extracted chlorophylls from sample collecting and also measured them the next day. I ran a PCR on two different DNA samples.

 The first week of the internship went really well, I’m really excited for all the work we’ll be doing this summer! The first day we just had orientation, so we introduced ourselves a bunch of times and learned about the school. I met my mentors, Michelle and Tawnya, and learned more about what I will be doing for the summer. In the afternoon I measured RFU values of phytoplankton, then learned how to transfer the dying phytoplankton to new test tubes in order to allow them to continue growing.