This past week has been fun both in and outside of work. Last weekend was super fun as me and a few of the other REU interns went to Eugene for the weekend! It was such a nice chance to get out and actually experience the summer heat I’m used to (lol). The transition from Georgia to Oregon has had me missing the heat of summer (crazy right?). We actually ended up visiting this really pretty watering hole, where there was rock sliding and some pretty cool places to jump off of too, I just wish all of the interns could’ve come along! This week I’ve been working more with George and Maureen to conduct more trials on my sea star larvae. Our main goal was to make a slide where they would interact with a boundary so we could image them under the fluorescing microscope to observe any signaling. We did run into a few difficulties as we needed something that we could add to the slide that would actually work as a boundary. We tried 10-micron (very, very small) glass beads (didn’t see much), considered sand (too big), and finally settled on these plastic beads that were about 100 microns (about ten times bigger than the glass beads). However, after finding these plastic beads, when we tried adding them to the slide, they just moved to the edge of the water droplet instead of actually sitting on the slide, not ideal when our experiments need the larvae to be able to collide with the beads. I tried supergluing them to a prepared slide; however, it was hard to separate each individual bead and the slide ended up being too thick to actually get any good videos. George helped by giving me the advice to treat the beads with a protein that would keep them from moving to the edge of the water droplet and clumping together, and it worked!! I’ve done some imaging of the larvae interacting with the artificial boundaries, but it’s really hard to observe localized signaling because for some reason the larvae just stop swimming?? Guess we’ll just have to keep on moving, and hope the larvae do to. Until next week… :)
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