This last week is going to be a crazy stressful and fun week! I am trying to get the last few experiments and results in before the posters are due! I am running against the clock to get my final photos in. I decided to run and include a drug treatment that kills all the microtubules in the cell. It is to see if the movement of the DNA is dependent on microtubules, or if there is another mechanism moving them. The poster is due Tuesday morning and I am hoping to get my results Monday afternoon. That does not give me much time for error. I am expecting that the DNA with not move if the microtubules are not present. If this test proves me wrong, that opens up a door full of questions. Hopefully, I won't have any issues staining my fertilized cells, like I have in the past.
I am excited about presenting my information this Friday. It is an awesome feeling to be able to look back at all I have learned over these past nine weeks. You don't realize how far you have come until you take a step back. It is also a nice feeling to know that you have a poster you can bring back to your home institution and present it at the local conferences. Even being able to bring it home to show my friends and family is very exciting! This past weekend, we had a crab-boil with other interns. We ate a ton of invasive European Green Crabs and they were delicious! It was my first time boiling crabs myself and my first time trying Green crab. I wish I could bring that back to the mid-west it was so good! The South Slough interns were the ones who invited us up to where they live in the hills to eat, the view was amazing. We looked out onto the valley as the sun set. It was a beautiful ending such a fun week.
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This is the start of the second to last week! All of us REU's are wrapping up data collection to we can start putting together our posters. It is hard to draw the line at the amount of information to put on the poster. I still have to collect the very early points of of just fertilization, to decide if there a pattern of sperm entry locality. I have been able to start analyzing and editing our raw image photos to get a better idea of the timeline and sequence of events. Using the program Fiji(formally Image J) to make our photos clearer and make them presentation ready! I can't wait to share my results and poster with you all at the end of this program. This past weekend we had a community outreach event! At the Charleston Marine Life Center(CMLC), we each had table to present our information to anyone who wanted to come! It was very fun to get younger kids excited about not only barnacles, but excited about science in general. It was funny to see their faces light up when I say I get to shoot laser at cells all day(in the confocal microscope) Hahaha. We also had many adults who were either very interested in science, or scientists who came in to see our work. It was challenging to change terminology so fast between a 6 year old to a 60 year old. It was a great experience to have and made me even more excited about my own work as I saw others so interested. Outside of the OIMB program, I was able to go fishing again this past weekend! A couple of weekends during this program, I have tried to go fishing and catch a Steelhead trout. It is a Rainbow Trout that lives in the ocean and swims up the rivers every fall. They are a very fun fight and jump a ton when they are hooked. I finally was able to catch one! I went with a fishing guide I became friends with named Jordan( from Rogue fishing anglers) and he brought me out on his float boat to go fishing. We fought the 101 degree heat but I finally hooked up and landed my first Steelhead ever! They are a beautiful fish. Next week I will include some of my images from the confocal that will be on my poster. Hopefully during this week, I will be able to collect a few more time points and get those microtubules on the inside of the cell more clear. It is sad that this internship is coming to an end, but the end is just so exciting!
Week 6! Leaving only 3 weeks left, I am starting to analyze our images. For these next two weeks I am analyzing the pictures I have taken, deciding if there are any stages that we are missing or if there is a stage we need a better image from. What we have collected so far is nice, but there are some improvements that could be made. It seems as though the microtubules staining is very bright and strong on the outside, but is dissipating the deeper into the cell we look. This makes the inside microtubules fuzzy. We are unsure to why this is occurring, as we can see that it is penetrating all the way into the cell.
With this data collecting, I am starting to try organizing it into a poster presentation format. We are all going to be able to present our posters on the very last day of this program. I am excited to not only see all my work from the summer, but get to read the final results from everyone else. I hear about everyone's' good and bad days either in the lab or the field, so it is going to be nice to see all their information, knowing how much hard work was put into them. Getting outside of the lab, I was able to visit some friends of mine down near San Francisco over the weekend! It was my first time visiting and they took me all over to see the city. I had some of the best Thai food of my life and the street food might have been even better. I had one of the best hot dogs of my life..... I never thought I would be bragging about a good hotdog, but it was that good. Besides the food, we also went to watch a Giants V.S. Cubs game (Go Chicago) with an amazing view of both the field and the ocean. The game was close but the Cubs lost, and my friends made sure I remembered that. Hahaha. It is nice to be back at OIMB and back to the relaxing pace of life here. There are still so many places that I need to see near here, likes some of the cool caves, and time is running out fast. I can't decide which I want to spend more time on, finding cool places or doing extra research. This week has been full of adventures inside the lab and out! For the first 3 days of this week, Sherlyn and I were alone in lab, as both Professor George and Erin being out of town. Monday morning as I went to look at my slides under the confocal microscope, the fluorescent tagging didn't appear. I had to look at every step of the fixation and staining process to see where something could have gone wrong. Wednesday, I was able to fix the problem, as creating a new anti-body mixture using DM1A anti-mouse primary anti-body serum. Having the experience to trouble shoot and learn of my mistakes on my own has a great experience. It has given me the confidence to work on a lab alone, as even as things may not go perfect, I can figure it out and get back on track without needing a professor all time time. It makes me excited for the future, for when I am working in my own lab, creating my ow experiments. This week, I have been able to create document the sequence of events between two and four hours after meiosis two. In this time period, we are seeing the mitotic spindle form and separate the chromosomes in preparation of first cleavage. We see the cortical microtubules arranging on the surface of the cell as if to squeeze the cell causing first cleavage, but then tend to disappear. I am unsure as why that would occur and I am planning on continuing creating this sequence and timeline past four hours to hopefully understand the large picture instead of snapshots of what is occurring. Hopefully, by the time of poster presentations I will have a complete sequential order and hopefully a timeline to the DNA movement and microtubules order of the B. glandula embryo. For the adventures outside of the lab, Sherlyn and I went to the sand dunes just north of North Bend. Seeing two sand dunes, a beach, and swam in the North Fork of the Umpqua River. This REU program is about furthering your academic knowledge, but it also about experiencing a new area. It is amazing to be in Oregon for me as the environment here is incredible. You can stand on the top of a dune and look east to see the rolling hills and forest, then turn west and see the ocean. It was a breath taking landscape that I tried to capture in a photo, but it is never quite the same as seeing it. This past week has been much the same work so far. I am still working on creating a timeline from Meiosis 2 to the first few stages after the mitotic spindle forms. Of course, pro-nuclear fusion occurs between these two steps. I have had a set back this week, as two of my broods of embryos had trouble with the staining of microtubules. This upcoming week, I am going to replace the tubes of anti-bodies with new mixtures, as well as expirementing with differing anti-bodies. I have been using an anti-mouse anti-body, but we have ones such as anti-rat in the lab. They would stain for the same thing, microtubules, but would help us narrow down where the problem is occurring. When done correctly, we can see as above, the microtubules attaching to the condensed DNA, pulling half in each direction in preparation for the first cleavage. This is only at one specific depth in the embryo. With our confocal microscope, we are able to scan the embryo at many depths and the program we have puts all the images together. There we can see the embryo as a whole, instead of in slices. My plan is also to start staining very young, pre-meiosis 2, embryos to see of there is a consistent pattern in regard to where the sperm enters the cell. I Outside the lab this week, I have been able to go fly fishing a lot this past weekend at the local rivers. It was fun to catch a bunch of trout and get into the quiet of nature. I drove inland to the rivers, which got really hot really fast. I had to take a break mid-day to swim in the river. Even as it was ice-cold, it was very refreshing after being in the 90 degree sun.
Also, the REUs and the OIMB students got together for a fun relaxing evening at the OIMB beach down the street. I call it our "secret" beach because I didn't even know it existed until this week! It has been nice to grow our little community and get along with the students here. I can't believe it is almost half way through the summer! Concluding this week, I have started being able to do research on my own! I am confident and trusted enough to mate barnacles, extract their embryos, run an interval experiment, stain, and look at the embryos in the confocal microscope. WOW, that sounds like a lot when I write it out. Essentially, now I can create the images you see below. This is a barnacle embryo at Meiosis 2, when the polar body has already been extruded. On the left we are seeing the two pronuclei of the sperm and egg meeting! This is the where the Female DNA meets the Male DNA before the first division the cell will undergo. This is important to see as we are able to collect images in intervals, for example every 20 minutes, to watch for a general pattern at which the DNA is moving. We also watch the microtubules as they are the mechanism for how the DNA can position itself in the cell. The sperm initially send microtubules in all directions until it hits the female pronucleus(female DNA). Then pulls both sets of DNA together to combine. On the right, we are seeing the "mesh" of microtubules in the cell. This will help you understand about where the DNA are located in the cell. In the lab we observing these structures form and dissipate. Before the cell divides, we will see these microtubules start to break down and form new ones. Hopefully, I will be able to take a live video of these cells, watching the microtubules move as well as the DNA. Moving out of the lab, we were able to get on the OIMB boat this past Saturday morning. We trawled the bottom of the ocean about 150-170 feet down. Being able to see sponges and small bottom/near bottom creatures was very exciting! There were over 7 different star-fish species, decorator crabs, hermit crabs, many sponges, shrimp, jellyfish, sea cucumbers, and much more! Plus, it was a beautiful and clam day on the ocean, which makes the experience so much better.
Happy Fourth of July everyone! Our research has begun to build a vision for the rest of the summer! Over the first week we learned a lot about general and barnacle embryology. Having enough knowledge now, I have created my question that I will be focusing on for the rest of the summer. Is there a pattern that arises in regards to pro-nuclear meeting as well as where does the sperm enter the egg? To further explain, after a sperm and egg meet, the DNA of both must combine to create the young barnacle embryo. I am trying to learn about how these two groups of DNA find each other within the cell. We have and will continue fluorescent tagging these young embryos to see the DNA and microtubules and look at them under a confocal microscope. The microscope combined with the staining allows us to find and see specific parts of the embryos at specific depths through the embryo. By collecting a large amount of images from post fertilization to the first division the cell creates, we can analyze the images and describe what patterns are apparent and why they are doing what they do. Outside of the lab, we have been learning a lot about the local marine community by visiting the tide pools at low tide! As it is always fun to see the species that everyone knows, such as the starfish and sea urchins, it is outstanding how much life you would step right over without ever knowing its there. Limpets, Gum Boot Chiton, and Leather Back Chiton just to state a few new species I met. This cove have recently been overrun by sea urchins! The sea star populations have decreased due to the sea star wasting disease. The sea stars are a predator of the urchins, so a lack of sea stars have lead to a booming population of urchins. That's why you can see such a large field of purple urchins in this cove. In my free time this week, I have been visiting the beaches near Coos Bay. Especially towards sunset when the weather is nice, I enjoy sitting down near the water and either playing my guitar or watching the waves. I try to go to differing beaches every time, but these two spots are my favorite to revisit. For the weekend of the fourth, I was lucky enough to go home back to Illinois and see my family. Many of my cousins, aunts, and uncles came from out of town for a nice relaxing weekend. We were able to have a barbeque and celebrate my grandfather's birthday! I am excited to be back now and ready to continue trying to answer the questions we have regarding barnacle embryology.
Hi everyone! I am Gina Magro and I am originally from Tower Lakes, Illinois. I am currently attending UW-Stevens Point as a rising senior studying Biology and minoring in French. I have grown up playing lots of sports and spending most of my time outdoors. I love to fish, hike, camp, fly fish, and explore the outdoors. I moved 2,256 miles away from home for these 9 weeks for the chance to learn about the researching process and about marine life that I would have otherwise never seen. In this first week at OIMB, making the decision to go to the west coast has been such a cool experience. Adventuring the tide pools has been one of my favorite things to do so far here, as I could never have seen barnacles, starfish, anemones, etc. without taking a very (very) long drive west. I never thought that anemones were so squishy when they're out of water! Here are some friends I have found so far! I began research because I like the opportunity to answer questions that are unknown. Being able to describe things that no one else knows yet along with the 'how' and 'why' behind what is around us. Previously, at UW-Stevens Point, I have been apart of a parasitology lab. Focusing on the trematode parasite population in Scaup(a type of bird) from the Green Bay WI, area. There we were focusing on finding new and invasive flat worm parasite species. At OIMB, I am in George von Dassow’s lab, looking at the beginning portion of the barnacles' lives. In this first week, I have learned about the basic development of embryos focusing on local barnacle species. Leading us to some possible research questions, which includes investigating how the sperm finds the nucleus within the female egg and/or tracking early developing cells to see what part of the barnacle body they become. We were able to get out of the lab and go to Lighthouse Beach to collect Acorn and Gooseneck barnacles! Not only am I excited to work with barnacle embryos, but as well as to meet others in a scientific community. It has been fun to learn of the other REU’s stories of how they got into science, where they are from in the world, and what they want to be when they grow up. This is the first time I have ever been fully immersed into science and I am loving it! Everyone has been so nice and welcoming, it makes it so easy to move across the country. This past weekend we went on a camping trip together as a group! There was perfect weather the whole weekend and really helped all of us make friendships. You can see below Sherlyn and I in our wetsuits exploring! Sherlyn and I are lab partners and will be working together all summer! Above you can see us playing Spikeball on the beach, going on a hike and seeing beautiful views, seeing a group of elephants seals/sea lions, and (not pictured) even a grey whale! Every 10 feet it felt like there was a whole new view. It was hard to not stop and take pictures all the time!
Plus, here’s a few more pictures of some beautiful views just around campus! |
AuthorHello I am Gina Magro, currently attending University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. I am studying Biology with a minor in French as a senior this fall. Archives
August 2022
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