Blogs

The CMOP team at Oregon Health & Science University is moving next month! We wanted to give you a heads up that we are relocating to the OHSU Marquam Hill by the end of October. That is only 36 days away! The majority of our group will be in the Hatfield Research Center. Find out how to get there.

Tawnya Peterson

Tawnya Peterson, Ph.D., an assistant professor at OHSU Institute of Environmental Health and scientist with the Center for Coastal Margin Observation and Prediction, will discuss this unusual bloom-forming organism and how in-situ sensor technologies are being used to track the blooms in near real time. at the upcoming Oregon Association of Environmental Professionals Forum on September 19, 2013 at 6:30pm.

Our work on the accumulation of emerging contaminants by phytoplankton in the Columbia River stems from previous research performed by the US Geological Survey (USGS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

You can learn more about their research by following the links below (yes, their work was featured by OPB!). Enjoy!

September 2012 - http://earthfix.opb.org/water/article/clean-water-the-next-act-emerging-...

This was my last week at CMOP and I was both happy and sad about that fact.  On one hand, it means I'm that much closer to starting school again, but on the other hand it meant I wouldn't be able to come into lab and work every day.  Sadly, this last week was mostly spent working on my presentation and final report, meaning not a whole lot of lab work got done.

Monday: Continued writing paper, added an exponential function to the function set in my genetic programming code for SHO, spoke with Tuomas about fixing exponential function in code for SHO, and ran SIL SR to see if would generate similar results to a good run from last week.

This week I tried to get some more answers from the mutants that I didn’t send to be sequenced last week. To prepare for Tuesday’s transformations, on Monday I made media and inoculated all of my remaining mutants and two controls for overnight cultures. Since Monday was just waiting for bacteria to grow, I had time to work on my final paper and presentation. My mentor offered to listen to my presentation and gave me some feedback. This was really helpful and also very kind since she has to hear it a few times anyways!

Weeks nine and ten where used to wrap up the work, I did more catching up on cell counts on week eight since week nine was used mostly for other activities. The weekly culture transfers were done on Wednesday for both weeks since Tuesdays where used up. We also performed our daily time points every afternoon. These last two weeks I learnt to perform the ROS assays and ELISAs, these assays take all day to perform and are very time sensitive, so they have to be performed carefully.

It's hard to believe that this is the final week of my internship. On Monday, I cleaned up the DNA for sequencing and on Tuesday Rick took it to the Primate Center to be sequenced. Unfortunately, we won't get any of the sequencing results back until next week. I would like to have a look at the final results, so I will probably work for a couple of days next week. After doing all that work, it would be a pity if I didn't analyze some of the results!

I spent this last week of my CMOP internship mostly working on my final presentation. I ran some samples on the HPLC as well and once those were finished I compiled all of my data into nice graphs and tables. Final presentations were on Thursday and all of the interns did really well. Thankfully my presentation went without a hitch as well. I tend to speak a little too quickly when I'm nervous and presenting, but at least I stayed within the 10 minute time limit. 

Last week I continued to try to figure out why the barcoded samples weren't working. I tried different annealing temperatures, different amounts of DNA, different DNA samples and different reagents to help it work... And the DNA still wouldn't amplify with the barcoded primers. Finally, I did a PCR where I diluted the barcoded primers. After so many disappointments, I wasn't expecting it to work, but to my surprise, it did.