Weeks Three/Four - More waiting

Hi everyone!  It seems like I either forgot to write or forgot to post a blog for week three, although nothing too exciting happened.  I was a 4-day work week because of the holiday, although it really turned into just 1 day of work because we were waiting for an enzyme to come.  Normally it ships overnight but we got it 3 days after we sent in the order, so I wasn't really able to do any lab work.

This past week was spent on mostly PCR and gels, specifically using new primers and figuring out why our gel results for everyone in the lab were not working very well.  Although we didn't identify the exact problem, Pete and I think that the counter where we pour the gels to solidfy isn't quite level, meaning the gel is thicker on one end.  This causes a problem during the gel electrophoresis because the charge cannot be evenly distributed throughout the gel, which explains why the top half our gels were working but not the bottom half.  For any future scientists out there, be warned:  half of your job will be figuring out why your experiments aren't working and it could be something as simple as a uneven counter top.

Aside from more problem solving, I started using new Euduboscquella primers that are general for a variety of strains, not just the ones we've been finding in our Columbia River samples.  Using this will allow us to see what other strains (if any) of E. we have in our samples.  This can also be pretty helpful in conjunction with the microscopy work I've been doing.  So far, we only see E. infections in tintinnids, a known host, however the populations of E. only seem to be present during M. rubrum blooms.  It could be possible that there is some sort of interaction between M. rubrum and these tintinnids to explain these findings, however there isn't enough conclusive evidence yet.

Until next time, Deirdre