Week 2- Trip to Saturn03 in Astoria

This week was my first full week and was eventful as I learned how to work in the lab and got to take water samples in Astoria.

• This week we had the site visit from NSF on Monday. It was interesting to hear all about the different projects that people in CMOP are working on and how CMOP has been able to increase the number of summer inters they accept each year.
• Then Tuesday was my first day in the lab since I was not able to work the first week that most everyone else did. I definitely had to get used to all the new equipment and found it a little difficult to do some of the things that I had on my agenda for the day so I had to ask alot of question of my mentor. I learned so much about the lab processes in this first day.
• On Wednesday and Thursday myself as well as another intern and three mentors went to the Saturn03 in Astoria. This was were we took water samples for our project. We took three different samples at low tide and high tide as well as in between and then added varying molarities of sodium bicarbonate. We then incubated our samples in the water at Hammond Bay for three hours. ;After incubation we took filtered the water out and caught the microbes and sediment in the filter. I am excited to look at the samples and begin to extract DNA.
• On Friday we had a brown bag seminar with Valerie Palmer who talked about her research on the Lathyrus crop and the Lathyrism disease that it causes. I enjoyed the talk. I worked in the lab for a while doing cloning as well as had a meeting with my senior scientist, Brad Tebo.