Blogs

This week I spent quite a bit of time researching information on dynamic light scattering and methods we could employ to move forward with the particleomics project.  I learned a lot about methods of concentrating samples and separating particles of desired sizes.  It turns out that filtering samples isn't always the best way to concentrate or extrude particles.  Sometimes the action of filtration can cause particles to aggregate.  Even though a filter may say it lets through particles smaller than, say 10 microns, particles can aggregate on the filter fibers and cause f

Introduction:
Xanthan gum is a polysccharide, derived from the bacterial coat of Xanthomonas campestris. It is also the source of dismay for young scientists, who's only feeble desire is to obtain useful data. See Figure 1 below for an illustration of this phenomenon.

Methods:

I started to get in depth into my project this week. My first 2 weeks here at CMOP I was able to extract the rDNA of the dinoflagellates from the water samples from Iwaco Harbor and main channel #7 stations. These dinoflagellate DNA was engineered into a plasmid so they are now stable and can be kept for long periods of time.

Something weird happened just now.  I had almost completely finished my blog entry for this week and it was suddenly gone!  So that's frustrating, but I'll try again.  This week was one of the busiest for me thus far.  Lots of driving and lots of pipetting.

On Monday we prepared the freshwater medium that we will be using for some of our samples and autoclaved the glassware we will use to house our samples and the plastic collections flasks we will use in the field tomorrow.

This was a very short, yet productive week in the lab. The Mt. Erebus/Warren cave metagenome sequences finally arrived from Illumina sequencing Friday evening and I began my work Monday querying the samples for coxL, the gene encoding the enzyme carbon monoxide dehydrogenase (CODH), then assembling those genes for analysis.

This week was very demanding, both of work and brainpower. I am still currently working with Forecasts 26 and comparing it to the data that I have received from the four stations in Cunningham Slough (CSD 196430, 196612, 196617, and 196446).  

       There was barely any down time this week. I was almost always up and about doing something, because my project really got going over the past few days. This made for a very fast week! If every week continues like this, the rest of the summer will be over in a blink of an eye.