Blogs

One more week down and I am now halfway done.  This halfway point seems to relieve some of my stress and yet it puts extra pressure on me to work harder.  I know that I have successfully made it this far and now I have to keep pushing to make the most of my time with CMOP.

 This week the miniprep failed two times- we still haven’t been able to start sequencing at all. I mostly worked on doing cell counts from the infection experiment, which is going really well. I also spent a bit of time preparing for our midterm presentations next week. 

These first few weeks have passed at a breakneck speed
performing a multitude, a sundry, of deeds.
Everything was dandy and going to plan,
But, alas, this week, my hopes hit the fan.

For I have come to a place which every scientist fears,
A place that can bring grown men to childish tears.

The Waiting Place...for an intern just waiting.

Waiting for new hexanes to come to make the GC go,
or a full canister of propene to come, or for TCP to go,

This week I spent a lot of time in Excel, processing the data from last week's solar degradation experiments. I also prepared for our mid-term presentations which are happening on Monday. There wasn't much lab work to do, but next week we'll be running more PAH calibration tests, so I did some prep work in the lab.

 This week was all about continuing the temperature experiments from last week.  Due to the fact that our gathered data is still very variable, we decided to add more experiments for each temperature. For the next week, we will still be testing temperatures to gather more statistics.  On Thursday,  we tried an experiment with the streptavidin beads and the biotinylated DNA targets. Unfortunately, the experiment was not successful so the next goal is to try again with a new temperature.  Hopefully, next week will be more a successful week! 

... but I'm preparing to talk about lamprey.

A majority of this week was spent at the CRITFC office listening in on issues abroad the Columbia River Treaty. This experience was not only a learning experience, but a networking opportunity as well. The data I'm collecting will need to be reviewed by experts. At this workshop, I met a few connections, all of whom will look over my data to clarify the criticial effectiveness on salmon habitat. I also received an invitation to take a trip up to the Bonneville Dam.

Photo: Cynthia Boshell

The highlight of the week was a trip to Bonneville Dam, where I had a nice surprise: Lamprey were attached to the viewing window!