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. |
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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