Week 4

I can't believe this summer is going by so fast already.  4 weeks into it and we're almost half way done with the internship!

This week we managed to make a huge leap in progress.  All of the samples from all of the cruises have been isolated and most have even been amplified via PCR.  Some of the SAR 11 samples came up very weak if at all on the gel but most of the Archaea samples had very strong results.  The cool part about this bulk electrophoresis run is we were able to run it with a small fast-gel system called Lonza. Instead of 45-60 minutes of waiting for the gel to run it only took about 6 min! You could almost see the bands moving in action.

The picture below is consists of most of the parts of the DNA isolation kit we use to extract DNA from the Sterivex filters

This week Jordan Nakyamo and I also did some complicated software work with his mentor Dr. John Schnorr.  It mostly invlolved file formatting and data compilation which taught me quite a bit about an area in bioinformatics I am not too familiar with.

Now the only steps involved before we run microarrays are running PCR with Pseudo-nitzschia primers and then purifying all of the products thereafter.  That shouldn't take more than two days next week.