Week 9: The Tide Is High but I’m Holding On

This week was a busy one with last minute results, final presentations, and a final paper there was a lot to do. Its a good thing I still have one more week to get things done.

Our sequences from the KjITS1F/KjITS1R PCR is back and most of the sequences match the ITS region of a Katablepharid from the Columbia River Estuary that was previously sequenced. Now that we primers specific for Katablepharis and we have successfully cloned these sequences we can begin to make standards for quantitative PCR. We are still working on getting the Kj3F/ITS1R PCR to work because of the samples we did get to amplify all the sequences were Katablepharids

We also tested some general eukaryotic primers for the ITS region and the PCR worked well, so I cloned those samples to send for sequencing and we should get the results next week. We also cloned some samples from the 964F/1147R PCR and hope to get mostly Ciliate sequences back.

We also had final presentations on Thursday and Friday, and all the interns did a great job presenting their research. It was nice to be able to learn about how all the different projects progressed and where they are headed in the future. This was the last week for most of the interns so we said goodbye to 9 of the 13 interns. I will miss my fellow CMOPterns.