Blogs

This week in the lab we focused on turning the isolated RNA into cDNA. From here we add the labelled probes to the cDNA before we are finally ready to place them on the microarray chips. Turning the RNA into cDNA is kind of an important step. If the isolation was bad, we would not see a good yield in cDNA. This is particularly important because the conversion from RNA to cDNA itself reduces the amount of product. Thankfully, my cDNA yield was pretty good which also means my isolation technique is pretty good also.

The NSF site visit was the highlight of the week.

 This week was a very busy week for me!  Monday started off with mid-term presentations. It was very interesting to see what all my fellow interns have been working on these past five weeks. After presentations, Vena and I made the trip to Sharp where we completed our temperature tests.  Unfortunately, when we presented to data to Andrei on Tuesday, it was too variable to determine much from (what temperature works best for the multiple probe sensor array).

Hi Everyone! I'm typing this up while I'm waiting to depart on the R/V Jack Robertson, one of the APL's research vessels. We'll be doing a mission on Lake Washington, but there will be more to come on that in the next few days.

            I swore to myself after I took a class about it that I would never use Matlab again. It’s not intuitive at all, it has a help function that only really helps you if you know the name of the command you’re trying to execute, and it resembles a dictionary in another language that you would like to speak but can’t because the dictionary only shows you the meanings of the words rather than how to string them together. Yet here I am day-in and day-out relearning Matlab and its ridiculous language.

After a very eventful three day weekend filled with fun at the beach and Portland waterfront fireworks it was back to work.

On Tuesday we went sampling again to Hammond, Chinook, Willapa, Ilwaco and Rogue. We filtered the DNA onto sterivex filters and will be extracting the DNA from these sites most likely sometime next week.