We finished all of the molecular work this week, it will be all computer work from here on out. We ran 109 PCRs (polymerase chain reactions that amplify DNA) and ended up sending 44 of them for sequencing. Now we can use these last sequences in our guide.
We have started to put the guide together and sneaking a peek of our final product has been really exciting for all of us. The guide will act like a flip book that a worm enthusiast could carry in their pocket when they are out in the field, with one double-sided page for each nemertean species. There are two aspects of the guide that set it apart from existing guides. The first is that each card has a large color photo of a specimen of that species, as existing guides contain only black and white photos or line drawings of individuals. The picture entirely takes up the front of each card. There will be information about the species range and habitat on the back, in addition to a picture of the central stylet for hoplonemerteans. The second crucial aspect of our guide is that species identifications are verified with DNA barcoding so that we know each photo in the guide actually belongs to the species it represents. This is why we have spent so much time and energy on the molecular side of the project and working with sequences on the computer. All of the interns will be presenting our research projects at a poster session held on the last day of the program, which is next week. As the more labor intensive parts of my project have quieted down, I have been spending a lot of time designing and making my poster so that it can easily be understood by someone who is potentially unfamiliar with nemerteans and biodiversity surveys. It is definitely a challenge to balance brevity and comprehensiveness when talking about my project. I also did not realize ahead of time how logistically difficult it is to fit everything I want to talk about onto a 1,400 square inch (which is a lot less than it sounds) poster. Waiting on the last of our results to complete the poster reminds me how close we are to the end of the program and how soon we will be leaving the field station, which is a little sad. However, I am excited to present the poster to people who are (hopefully) genuinely interested in what I worked on this summer at the poster session. Below is the species card (front and back) for Nipponnemertes bimaculata, one of my favorite ribbon worms.
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AuthorI am Jacob and am from Rancho Cucamonga, CA. I am a rising Junior at Pomona College in Claremont, CA who has never studied marine biology in school before but has always been interested in it. I am incredibly excited to spend the next two months working in Svetlana Maslakova’s lab studying Nemertean (ribbon worm) biodiversity through genetic analysis. Archives
August 2021
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