Blogs

This week our mentor is Nate Hyde, he has us comparing the models of the RDFS website and the actual observations. The first day all four of us were assigned a different model to examine, I was assigned the model CORIE FDB21. Our task was to determine what the model did well and what it did poorly.My model did fairly good except when it came to predicting for salinity near the river.

Week 5 was pretty busy.  We did two lac assays-the first seemed to support our hypothesis, but there were some strange results on the second, so we're taking a few steps back this week and looking at our Bacillus strains.  I also used two-step PCR to introduce a mutation into the anthracis narG promoter.  If everything goes as planned, we should be able to sequence the (hopefully) mutated promoter and continue from there.

A TRIBAL PORTAL WEBSITE was done last summer. I will be building upon the information already provided and include sources.

7-13
Repeated conjugation procedure exactly as before except the strains are labeled H-P.

Repeated competent cell transformation with commercial competent cells (exactly the same as before).

7-14

The highlight of my week was when I traveled to Astoria to visit the MERTS center that houses PHOEBE.  I was able to learn in detail how PHOEBE works and what exactly PHOEBE does.  I was and still am impressed by the fact that the glider moves by utilizing the properties of density, and because of that she is able to spend more time out collecting data on each mission. 

Last week, Monica and I thought of ways to model data from the estuary, then on Friday we all went to the Midsummer Conference at OSU. It was actually really fun, and I enjoyed it more than last year. I saw a very interesting presentation about the human brain and got to tour the wave lab.

This week, Nate is going to be our mentor. He has us using the Rapid Deployment Forcast System. We've each been assigned a forcast. Mine is CORIE fca200mf 100. We looked at them under different conditions to look for errors.

This week we were given the task to write a report about what we have accomplish so far in our project and what our recommendations are for the final product.

i havent been back to the computer lab in a while. its time to get back to work and get my game face on to do some good work ethic. everyone is here today its nice to see everyone again. the osu conference was very fun and interesting i enjoyed the experience. especially the science of baking work shop. that one was my favorite,  not only were we hands on but we got to eat!!! i met a lot of new people and made some friends. but other than that its nice to be back on this side of town again and to start working with our new mentor nate. he is very nice and smart and patient with me.

This week we were finally able to isolate, amplify and purify 88 total samples to be hybridized.  This was a huge leap in progress because we can now spend the rest of the next five weeks hybridizing and analyzing microarray data.  Monday and Tuesday were the last days of isolation and PCR, so Wednesday we moved on to labeling 12 samples with Biotin to get them ready for the hybridization process.  These 12 samples included 6 Marine Archaea products and 6 SAR 11 products from Aug 2007 samples.  The entire process is pretty lengthy because there are many incubation steps,

I spent this past week taking images of the B.pacifica and B.neritina ovicells that contained (what seems to be) E.sertula cells! It has been quite a challenge to keep everything organized -- I relabeled every sample I considered significant so that I could keep better track of my "final" images.

Also, this week I looked at my final FISH samples from B.pacifica. So far, I have some great images that I am very excited to share in my presentation and paper!