Hello again dear reader, Another week has passed and we continue to have trouble with the jellyfish being reliable. There was however a bright glimmer of hope as we actually took our first movie of unilateral cell division in jellyfish embryos on the confocal microscope this week! This is what we have been waiting for. When we finally got the dividing cells on the microscope everyone in the lab was so excited that four of us missed lunch to watch. It was really fun (and someone saved us all a plate). The cells had been injected with ‘life act’, a probe for actin, and the movie we captured does show us some very promising features. Mostly, the famous and elusive contractile ring was nowhere to be seen. Which is interesting because if the contractile ring model is not the whole picture, how are these cells dividing? We hope to get some more jellyfish soon and try it again. Ideally we will take more videos, with probes for different things and from different angles. I knew coming into this project that it was going to be ‘exploratory’ science with no guarantee of success and I am starting to come to terms with that. At the same time, I really hope it works! Stay tuned to see if the jellyfish come back next week In the mean time, I'd like to introduce you to seven nudibranchs that we have found on the docks when we go down looking for jellies. Check them out! We also looked at some bryozoans and ascidians under the stereo microscopes. Both of these were types of tiny, beautiful colonial animals that you would never see if you did not look at them under a microscope.
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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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