Week 2

On Monday of this week the site visit team from the National Science Foundation, whose grant funds the CMOP research, came for a day of presentations regarding all the research going on here at CMOP.  Although it was a long day of presentations, it was great to see all the research being conducted and the technology being used in all different fields of CMOP's research. It also gave me a better idea of CMOP's overall goals as an organization.

As far as my research project goes, this week I finished up extracting the samples from the May 2009 cruise and conducted a few PCR reactions using the samples. We conducted 16s and 18s PCR reactions. Unfortunately, the results were not as clean as we had hoped. The samples are quite dirty which makes it very hard for the PCR reactions to provide the best results. We did try a dilution (10X and 20X) of the samples for the 16s reaction but unfortunately this did not help. Next week we are going to try a few other tricks that will hopefully help us get some better results.

On Thursday, Vanessa took all of us interns on the Max into Portland to get a tour of OHSU. We got a tour of the campus from a few graduate students and it was great to pick their brains for advice about graduate school. We also got to ride the tram over the freeways! Every time I pass that tram under the freeway I want to ride it and it was awesome to finally do it. We got beautiful views of the city and mountains since it was a decently clear day.