Hi Everyone!
I’m Megan. I’m a fourth-year undergraduate student at the University of Iowa where I am majoring in biology and environmental science and minoring in chemistry. Unfortunately, there is no ocean in Iowa, and that makes studying marine biology a bit difficult. In short, that’s why I am here. I want to learn anything and everything that I can in the next nine weeks about marine life while improving my research skills. I am very excited to be here. Back in Iowa, I research how plants and other forms of life interact with and change trace organic pollutants. These pollutants include things like fungicides and pesticides. Studying these processes helps us to understand what happens to these chemicals after they end up in our streams, lakes, and rivers. Are you sensing a pattern here? I really like water. I am very excited to be working in the Maslakova lab for the next 9 weeks. We will be studying the diversity of Nemerteans, aka ribbon worms. Nemertea is a diverse group, but these worms are understudied and hard to tell apart from each other based on appearance alone. Throughout the next nine weeks, I will be helping to extract, amplify, and sequence DNA from worms that were collected in Colon, Panama. This effort is a part of a longer-term project to assess nemertean diversity, and Colon is one site that has never before been sampled with respect to nemertean diversity. We will use a process to amplify the gene we want (CO1 in my case) called polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which basically makes a whole bunch of copies of only (hopefully) the gene we are looking at so that it is able to be sequenced, or read. These “DNA barcoding” sequences will ultimately help us to determine how many species are present in the area. It hasn’t been ALL work so far though. My fellow REU students and I have spent the last week getting to know each other and exploring the beaches and woods near campus. I also got to go tidepooling with my lab on Thursday to find live Nemerteans and other fun invertebrates. The Oregon coast – though quite cold – is beautiful and full of diverse life that I have never been able to see before. I cannot wait for all the adventures that the next eight weeks will bring.
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AuthorHi! I’m Megan Powers, a fourth year Biology and Environmental Sciences student at the University of Iowa. Throughout my summer at OIMB, I will be working with the Maslakova lab to assess Nemertean diversity in the Caribbean. Archives
August 2019
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