Week 5: The Seaweed Is Always Greener In Somebody Else's Lake

Beginning with midterm presentations and ending with the NSF site visit it seems like things are going by so fast and progressing, while I am standing still.

On Monday the interns presented their research and we learned about each project's advances and its struggles. It was interesting to hear the other intern’s presentations and how they have been progressing with their research in during the internship. I am looking forward to learning more about these projects at the final presentations.

This week was spent a lot with PCR in order to test primers to prepare for quantitative PCR. And while many PCR reactions were unsucceful, we were able to find a few primers for general ciliates that worked and we will be cloning the samples to send for sequencing to make sure the primers only amplify ciliates. We also tested a few katablpharis PCR and one of the reactions worked but some of the samples had different sized bands so we will also be sending those for sequencing hoping that these primers are more specific than before.

 I also extracted DNA from our samples that we collected on Tuesday and the extraction went well, the samples had high DNA concentrations and amplified in PCR.

Thursday was the National Science Foundation (NSF) visit. It was nice to be able to see how the evaluation process works and to hear about the initiatives that many of the senior scientists were presenting.  I was most interested in the second initiative dealing with Myrionecta rubra blooms, since Myrionecta is a ciliate in the Columbia River system it is very likely that I may come across Myrionecta in my analysis of protists in the estuary. It was neat to see that my project relates to one of the bigger projects of CMOP.