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Week 3: DNA Extraction

This week I continued to photograph chironomids to prove that they were diatom free on the outside. Claudia, my frontline mentor, was out of town, so I was working indenpendently to get the pictures done, sort through more samples, and also prepare for a DNA extraction. Once again, because Chironomids are a new area of study for this lab, I needed to look through the literature to determine the best way to get DNA from a whole chironomid and how to ensure that diatoms in their guts would also have their DNA extracted. After finding several papers that all concurred that the Qiagen DNEasy DNA Extraction kit was the best choice, I worked with Michelle to obtain the kit and perform the extraction.

The results were exactly what I had hoped for. We extracted DNA from a single chironomid and also from a group of 20 chironomids becasue we wanted to know what amounts of DNA we would be working with this summer. There was plenty of DNA in a single chironomid for us to work with. However, the really interesting question is whether we were able to extract DNA from the Diatoms in the Chironomid guts. This is something we will work on next week, but I am hopeful that we were able to get both Chironomid DNA and Diatom DNA.