Blogs

 After meeting with one of my future users (there aren't very many of them) I've been given a few more things to add to my interface. However, a ten day break to go to Italy has not given me much time to actually add the new features. The only real change I've made since my last blog was to add little calender symbols by the start and end time shufflers (what I've taken to calling a series of buttons that allow a user to adjust the start and end time of the graph).

What a busy week.  We're almost done working directly with our samples, and will be doing lots of data analysis in the upcoming weeks.

On Monday, we worked on purifying our day 0 RNA.  The RNA extraction procedure doesn't distinguish between RNA and DNA and so we need to remove the DNA contamination from our RNA samples. 

This was a pretty straight forward week!! It simply began and ended. I spent most of my time finalizing my coding scripts to get them ready for my model run that will be finished on Monday! I can not wait to get the run and start extracting data from it and conducting my comparisons. I also can not wait to conduct an analysis of Physical Habitat Opportunity for Salmon. I did, however, find what I think is a potential error with in the Forecast-26 Model.

What a week!  There was never a dull moment this week.  I got my first taste of a graduate school experience on Monday when my Principal Investigator asked me to prepare a presentation of the work that I have done over the past few weeks and present it in front of him and another research group.  It wasn't a formal presentation but rather a casual presentation meant to inform everyone of my progress and create an environment where ideas about how to move forward could be discussed.  It was a great experience and took away a lot of anxiety about presenting in front of res

After having identified an abundance of coxL in the Warren cave metagenome last week, I spent the first half of this week building a phylogenetic tree in order to learn more about the evolutionary radiation of the coxL gene and the relatedness of the cave samples to cultured and uncultured microbial species. In order to begin the tree-building process, I first had to align the contiguous sequences from the metagenome with the coxL IMG database and translate the nucleotide sequences to amino acids.

       This week I felt a lot more confident in threw me off a little bit, due to the holiday in the middle of the week. Before this point, I never thought I would confuse Wednesday with Sunday. But nonetheless, the work continued and the day off gave the bacteria an extra day to grow.

             This week turned out to be a relative slow week, compared to my last few weeks at CMOP. Last week, Ben and I prepared Iwaco Harbor and main channel station # 7 prebloom/bloom/postbloom dinoflagellate 18S rDNA samples, and transformed the E.