I’ve had quite an exciting week in lab; the time finally came to test out some of my probes! I tried out the two Ect2 mutants I was making last week that have mutations in the regions that are thought to bind Rock (affectionately termed Putative Binding Regions, or PBR). In one version of the mutant only the Rock binding regions are mutated (simply PBR), but I also created a version of the mutant that contains both the Rock mutation and the Snowflake mutation I documented in week 3 of this blog (Snowflake-PBR). I started injecting oocytes with both versions of the probe alongside wild-type Ect2 and Snowflake Ect2 controls. Left: a bat star with a protruding stomach (a sign of a healthy animal and ripe ovaries!) Right: a starfish without a protruding stomach. Unfortunately, the oocytes I have injected so far have been largely uncooperative. They did not express either probe at a high enough level to image, and many of them seemed quite sickly. The ones injected with the PBR probe also had odd zones of bright green Rho activity and behaved very strangely when I added hormone. Despite this oddity, they had dim Ect2 expression, which was a little discouraging. The snowflake-PBR mutants also had somewhat dim expression, but I have hope that the batch of oocytes is at fault, not the batch of Ect2 mutants. One of our dissecting microscopes that we use to sort embryos and look at eggs, larvae, jellyfish, and lots of other cool things! We will be taking this microscope with us to the Charleston Marine Life Center to educate the public about our research. Aside from injecting and imaging a number of oocytes this week, I have been getting ready for presenting my project at the Charleston Marine Life Center this weekend. I fertilized some of my bat star eggs, so hopefully I will have some larvae by Saturday that little kids can look at under a dissecting microscope. I am looking forward to talking to the general public about my research, but a little concerned that my research is difficult to explain to kids. Hopefully they will appreciate looking at movies and larvae as much as I do!
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AuthorI am a rising junior at Carleton College, majoring in biology with minors in Neuroscience and Russian. I'm very excited to be working in Dr. George von Dassow's lab this summer, where I will be studying cell biology and embryology of marine invertebrates. Archives
August 2019
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