Blogs

This week is was busy stripping microarray chips. We finally hybridize a full duplicate set of 8 samples and are now looking at the results. Unfortunately, much cannot be concluded until we hybridize more samples, but this is a start. Right now im working on my presentation and changing more smaples from RNA to cDNA.

UNTIL NEXT TIME...

     So, week 7 and not much new to say. I recently received the finalized values for both the salmon and lamprey filters, so I can now go ahead and start the whole filtering process consisting of running several c-codes and various Matlab scripts. Assuming everything runs according to plan, I will have figures of the number of filter criteria hours satisfied over the whole estuary, movies of the figures, and time series graphs at the end of the process.

I can't believe there are only two weeks left in this internship! It seems like summer weather just got here. And there is quite a bit of work left to be done.

 So much to do and so little time left! This week we went to BAT to collect water and we were going to attempt to set up an in situ experiment in order to see if there was a major difference in grazing rates that we were getting from the light inside as compared to outside light. Unfortunately we weren’t confident that the bottles would stay attached to the rocks along the edge of the river and we didn’t want them washed away to sea, so we decided to just do a normal grazer experiment.

This week brought another round of long days sampling data, but the data processing has been eased by my completion of a MATLAB script to correct the EEMs automatically. I ran the biodegradation samples through the fluorometer on Monday and Wednesday, and we're starting to see some exciting results - at least one of the oils is showing a significant decrease in some of the fluoroescent peaks, indicating that the bacteria are indeed breaking down the PAHs as we had hoped.

The highlight of the week was the trip to Astoria, where I met Saturn 1 in person.

 This week started and ended with fun field trips! As usual, Monday was a Sharp day, where we continued our temperature tests at the new 30C and 45C temperatures.  Tuesday, we took a trip to Bonneville Dam, which was interesting and also very informative. We were able to take a tour of the dam and see where the fish passed through, which was my favorite part. After the trip, we had a nice little picnic, then headed to Multnomah Falls where the other interns and I took a one mile hike. The view at the top was beautiful!

This week set the stage for experiments to be run next week. The calibration set up is nearly finished (just one more piece to glue in place). Nick Michel-Hart, the engineer working on the REMUS vehicles, was able to get an o-ring groove put on the top end cap so that it will be sealed but still removable. I want to stress the awesomeness of his feat: typically to get an o-ring groove put in, you submit the work to the machine shop and it takes weeks. Nick was able to submit it to the machine shop and have it done in one day.