Time has flown by at OIMB! I can't believe our last week is coming to a close. It's been an amazing experience and I can't believe it's almost over. This week in lab has been a whirlwind; I've been trying to test out my 'Cat' and 'Dog' probes with varied degrees of success. My 'Dog' construct seems to be fairly unstable and expresses inconsistently in both starfish and barnacles with little localization. My 'Cat' construct, on the other hand, appeared to cause high levels of Rho activation, especially during second meiosis. However, since I injected the 'Cat' probe along with a cocktail of other probes, I couldn't see the 'Cat' expression alone. Instead, I had to judge whether other probes had a reaction to my probe (almost as if my probe was a treatment, not a fluorescent tag). Ultimately, more experiments are needed to better understand whether the probe is activating myosin and promoting contractility. Although I won't be here to help, hopefully my probes produce useful results in future experiments. Hiking some of the South Slough trails with Renee and Megan! We are having our final poster session this week as well. Although it was definitely a challenge to integrate everything I worked on this summer into one cohesive final product, I'm fairly happy with how it turned out. Despite my ‘Cat’ and ‘Dog’ probes not quite working as planned, my poster is a reminder that I did have some success with other probes this summer and did get some interesting results. I'm going to miss juggling oocytes between microscopes, babysitting eggs during long recording sessions on the confocal, poking at nudibranchs in the sea tables, bonfires at the OIMB beach, and most of all, the people I've met. We've formed a tight-knit community here at OIMB, and it's definitely going to be hard to leave. Thank you to everyone who helped make this summer so special!
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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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