Good afternoon everyone! As I was reflecting on this past week, I realized how much I've accomplished and how much is yet to come. I feel so grateful to be experiencing all these things, especially along with amazing people that inspire me to be better. Last weekend I did a lot of cool things that I have been wanting to do since I got here. I went to downtown Coos Bay for a nice walk and explore the museums with an unexpected but valuable company. We also made a trip to Sunset Bay beach with some UO friends and we finally got to check out Bastendrof beach too. The OIMB picnic for the 4th of July was so fun and I tried awesome local cooked oysters. One of my favorite parts of the week was the Wednesday lunch with a scientist where we met Dr. Aaron Galloway. Listening to him talk about his academic path gave me a new perspective of what I will like for my future. I still want to attend graduate school and pursue my research, but I dont feel pressure to follow a traditional path or to only focus on research. I am hoping this summer I`ll discover more about my scientific and life interests and how to achieve them. On Tuesday we started the experiments that I describe last week for my project and after a couple of trial and errors, I finally got an idea of how these peristaltic contractions work and what they affect. We treated different broods of embryos with 2 amounts of cytochalasin B for 5,10,15, and 20 min before washing them with filtered seawater. We find out that it only takes about 3 minutes for the drug to take effect and stop the wavy motion. Some cells recovered completely, going back to their divisions in meiosis II and others had an interesting development after where they stayed spherical with minor contractions. We are still looking to find a good protocol to wash the cells without killing them, time them and get effective results. My experiments are pretty dependent on barnacle matings as we have to dissect the egg sacs very carefully and hard to know exactly if the eggs are fertilized or not because of the internal fertilization they have. Today we didn't get many matings and I couldn't treat cells with the drug, so to stay productive I took care of the sand dollar larvae (from week 1) and they are doing pretty well with some of them already going to their juvenile stage.
Because the weather is pretty nice these days, Erin and I went to the docks to get more barnacles for next week. Lastly, I got to work a lot on my research proposal and abstract which hopefully you will get to read soon.
1 Comment
Irma
7/21/2022 09:26:57 pm
Your road has been long to accomplish tours goals.
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Sherlyn SanchezHello :) I'm Sher, a first-gen biology student transferring to UCSD and passionate about science. This summer I'll be working in George von Dassow`s lab doing barnacle embryology research. In this blog, I'll be sharing some of my adventures and life updates at the OIMB. Archives
August 2022
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