Our Coos Bay microclimate treated us to an exemplary last week: classic fog-steeped mornings and breaks for sun around lunch, and just enough flashes of distant lightning to make us all question our sanity at least once. The first two days were our last of research. I spent them trying and failing to gather some supplemental video data, then farting around with diatoms under the confocal. I came to the Von Dassow lab hoping to learn imaging - I can’t credit myself with comprehensive knowledge of anything, of course, but I wield my new skills with glee. Riley put out the last call for data on Wednesday afternoon, then printed the posters in the mysterious poster dimension. And just like that, all of our projects came to a close, wrapped up, for what it’s worth, in 30-odd-inch cardboard tubes. We celebrated with a charcuterie dinner on the big beach and another good old-fashioned frolic. Thursday seemed to pass in a fugue, as we scoured our presence from the labs, sorting, scrubbing, and dumping our last specimens out to rejoin the sea at last. I bid goodbye to our sand dollar children, which have grown into a beautiful cadre of pluteus larvae. Like any good parent, I did not mention to them the <1% chance of survival for planktonic larvae in the ocean. And yesterday, Friday, was our true last hurrah. We held court in an open poster session, and I got to talk chimeras with so many wonderful students and scientists from the station and its associated departments. I’m so proud of my freakish little embryos - of everything I’ve done this summer - of all of us. We all did fantastic. We were researchers! Then began the time of the rising tide, the time of goodbyes. Evening saw us out at Richard Emlet’s house for a potluck, where we ate good seafood and blew some potatoes to kingdom come with a duct-tape shielded PVC cannon. As the light trickled away back on the station, Ethan finally broke out his famous violin and serenaded us with some Romanian folk tunes. It was a fitting sendoff. To Maya, Richard, George, and Erin; to my REU cohort, thank you all so much for showing me the ropes and keeping me alive, for goofing around and being so serious, for answering my questions and questioning my answers, for making this one of the best summers of my life. It is the half moon of August, the small tide. Maybe some things don’t have to change so much. My sister has come down to get me. In an hour I’ll be packed and gone, back up the coast whence I came, out of the fog and into the rest of the year. And then who knows where? Currents are unpredictable things. But whatever happens, this blog now comes to a close. If you have questions about the program, you may contact me through the form below (emailing to [email protected]). If you’d like to hear more REU research stories, my friends’ blogs and those of past summers are available on this website. As for me, this is El signing off for the last time. Dear readers, friends, colleagues, family, thank you for tuning in. Farewell, and fair winds to you all.
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We have one more week. My word, that’s crazy. This place, this project, these people, have shaped and bounded my whole life this summer, and now in seven days, I’ll go. It was a hunkered-down week, all of us working to scrape our data into coherent stories on posters. The task felt a threatening one at first - all those diversions, details, rabbit holes, and caveats I’ve been through in my research, a tale as busy and sometimes chaotic as this season has been. Now that I’ve put it together, though, I can step back and fit it all in the span of my arms. I’ve decided to focus on my chimera project for the final poster, rather than the Rho/Ect2 division recordings. I have much less data for this one, only a single frantic week! But I find myself more excited about this idea and result, and it doesn’t hurt that the pictures are pretty. On Saturday, we got the chance to share our research with the visitors to the Charleston Marine Life Center, the aquarium run by OIMB, which is also the new home for the critters we collected from our dredge expedition on Week 5. Everyone held a station with activities and information for the guests. At mine, they got to look through a microscope at dividing sea star embryos; Naia challenged them to sort green crabs; Ethan and Audrey showed them how to extract DNA, and let them touch a nemertean worm. Remember how we went worm-hunting last week? That was why. The next day, a bunch of the summer students, and Ethan, came down with Covid. Fantastic. That leant a nice whiff of paranoia to the week that none of us appreciated. Luckily, Ethan could get his data manipulation done from his room, and no other staff or students caught the plague. I’d like to thank any OIMB dwellers reading this for working to respond fast and protect each other. This could have really, really, stunk, but instead it just stunk a normal amount Tuesday was Indian Independence Day, so as a welcome break from poster work, we went out to celebrate with Shreyaan. By “went out,” I mean that we picked up butter chicken and curry from American Market (highly recommended) and ate it in the bright evening at Bastendorff Beach. Feeling refreshed, we spent a while frolicking on the wrack line, menacing each other with bullwhip kelp. Everyone presented their first poster drafts for feedback the next afternoon. There’s something special in the chance to see a completed project, a real result, emerge from months of work. Tara, in fact, is off presenting her results at a deep sea biology conference in Brazil! I feel like each of us is an ant, hauling home a grain of information to add to the hill. It took us a season to dig it up. It’s not very big, measured against the ocean of things. But it’s ours. I’ll see you again next week, readers, for my last entry of the summer.
But they each have a full complement of chromosomes and division machinery, shelved and unused. And if you happen to make a slide with lots of eggs all lined up together, and if you happen to squish that slide a bit too much, then by random chance, some of those eggs will wind up with their polar body side pressed up against the glass, physically unable to pinch off and throw away one of those extra mini nuclei. Then, instead of resigning itself to its fate, that nucleus can copy and cleave like a normal cell. This is pretty exciting to me. Polar bodies are part of every animal life cycle, but they’re not often studied, and we don’t know much about what they’re capable of, why they go so quietly, and what would happen if they didn’t. And thus began our quest to raise a larva with one of these extra cells incorporated. We’re manipulating the second polar body, which makes a new cell with two identical sets of maternal DNA; previous studies suggest that the first polar body might not work well on its own. All this week, I fussed over little chemical vials, like a real mad scientist, trying to get our anomaly to happen on command. This has yielded a lot of frustration and some really splendid successes. We’ve had our best luck with cytochalasin B, a fungus-derived toxin that prevents cells from changing shape during division. Even so, small differences in the timing of second polar body formation mean that only a few eggs from every trial actually fail to throw away their extra nucleus. Fortunately, we only need a few. On Monday we injected our eggs with a dye that turns green when exposed to UV light, which lets us mark the third cell using the laser on the confocal microscope. Then, with apologies for the poisons and the lasers, we left the embryos to grow in peace, in the dark underneath a pipette box lid. First of all, this process is far too much fun. Second of all, at the end of the week, we gathered up our precious little larvae for their headshots. And behold! How cool is that? An animal like this, with two genomes coexisting (in this case, the zygote’s and the maternal clone) is called a chimera. It’s named for a monster of Greek mythology, a fire-breathing mishmash hybrid of lion, goat, and serpent. We will see no goat heads sprouting from these sea star larvae, but that interests me in and of itself: the contents of the polar body can function just like a whole egg, if you let them. Though, why do they always end up on the one side? Hm… After the month of wrestling that it took to get my non-answer answer out of the previous experiment, I feel ready to stomp, whoop, and holler over this one. I wish I had more time with it. I also wish I had more time with Coos Bay and with my friends and colleagues. I can sense the last weeks rushing in. Time gets funny near endings, like it does near stars. This week was so labby, and so many people have up and vanished - Madison and Randi to sea with a research cruise, Tara to Brazil for a chemosynthesis conference - that we never got very far outside of campus. But on the weekend before, Devin brought Naia, Ethan, Audrey and I along for his salinity testing circuit, through the winding estuarine valleys under the August sun. And on Sunday I went worm-hunting with the nemertean crew, revisiting the Sunset Bay tidepools. And on Wednesday I crafted a chiton shell out of cardboard, entered the annual costumed OIMB Invertebrate Ball, aka the Spineless Soiree, and danced the evening away like the mollusk I am. How does a mollusk dance? Well, mostly, we lie on the floor. Maybe you’d like it, dear readers, if you tried it too. When last I left you, readers, it was Friday evening and lab had just let out. Not thirty minutes after I’d finished writing that entry, all of us - except the nemertean genetics team, who were grappling with a technical crisis - piled into a car and drove two hours down the highway to Eugene, windows down. Why? Why not! We spent the night at Madison’s house, met her precious and perfect dog, and caught the Saturday farmer’s market. On the way home, missing the damp of Coos Bay, we followed Randi and Madison’s directions to a swimming hole with its own waterfall, and passed the late afternoon frolicking. Sunday was considerably more sedentary. We did, however, rouse ourselves enough for an evening of crabbing down at the marina, which netted us three red rock crabs and one Dungeness (but lost us two really big ones, alas, alack). Audrey, Shreyaan and I also went down to the dock earlier in the day to scout it out, and found ourselves enthralled by seal drama. They were all gone by evening, though. Throughout the week, as the summer weather came into full swing, we visited Bastendorff Beach, Maya Watts' house, the local market, and more, spending afternoons and sunsets in the company of trees and friends. The blackberries are fruiting, the twilight is golden, and did you know Maya's yard has a zipline?! Lab work this week was all about data processing. With ten or so large batch videos, I had plenty of zygote divisions to analyze. We’d even verified our protocol with a rerun, checking for problems caused by squished slides and dye concentration. So there I sat in front of my screen, measuring the furrows that separate cells as they cleave apart, and counting successes and failures. Some went fast, some went slow; some batches cleaved happily and some struggled.
We asked: do subtle tweaks to the waves in these cells alter the way they divide? We learned: “Eh, nah.” At least not the way we did it.
Huzzah. Of course, a no answer is still an answer. I did learn what I set out to learn! And maybe our larger question, about what excitable waves do for a dividing cell, would yield yet a more specific answer if approached from another angle, at another time. Whoever makes that effort can hopefully carry on the thread of information I’ve gathered to their own end. So it always goes in research, I guess. But I’ve talked with George, and together we decided that that person will not be me. The three weeks I have left are not enough time to start and see through a whole followup experiment. So to whoever comes after me, good luck! I hope the eggs cooperate and the (sea) stars align! I hope you’ll find use in my successes, but if not that, then at least in my mistakes; and if not that, then at least may it be a good story! As for me, I’ve decided to spend my remaining time here looking into an anomaly that caught my eye in our videos. So long, I’m off to see a man about a chimera… |
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