Week 2 has been both exciting and frustrating at times. Early in the week Nina, Sadie and I met with our mentor Dr. George von Dassow to solidify our research projects. All three of us decided to take on independent projects. There is overlap, our methods will be similar, but our research subjects will be different. Nina will be continuing the work on starfish, Patiria miniata, embryos. Sadie will be working with acorn barnacle, Balanus glandula, embryos and I will be working with jellyfish. We will all be working to uncover the mysteries of life. Both of their projects are super interesting and I highly encourage the reader to check out their respective blogs to learn more about the work happening in our lab. That’s the exciting part. The progress on my jellyfish project has been slow. We do not exactly have an established procedure for working with jellies, so I have selected three promising species to try to work with. I am attempting to find a way to reliably get gametes, particularly eggs, that we can micro inject with mRNA. We can then use a hormone that causes them to mature and add sperm to fertilize them. If we can get this to work we have a whole suite of RNA probes we can try out. Most of the probes work by making some part of the cell fluorescent. Then we will use the confocal microscope to take movies of the embryos’ early development and track the part of the cell we make fluorescent. I am really getting a sense for the scientific process. Almost nothing I have tried this week has worked. From trying to grow food for the jellies which never hatched, to walking down to the docks to find nothing at all, to using a hormone that is supposed to induce them to spawn within an hour that actually took two hours, this has been a week of ups and downs. We’ll just have to keep at it and hope for a breakthrough. This week I thought we could play a game of “guess that larvae!” I took the three pictures posted below, A, B and C. You tell me what common intertidal animals they come from and you win! Answers next week. A) B) C)
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AuthorMy name is Philip Aspinall, and I am a student at Sierra College in Grass Valley, California. The first time I peered into a microscope and found an entire, complex, beautiful world below the visible, I was transfixed. I am thankful for George von Dassow and Svetlana Maslakova for allowing me to work in their lab, and to Geroge for his generosity with his time and for being my mentor this summer. Archives
August 2019
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