Week 4: Short But Busy

This week with Tuesday being a day off from work to tour the Bonneville Dam and Friday being the 4th of July only consisted of 3 days in the lab. I recieved a new batch of primers on Monday that were designed to amplify USE from Cercozoa isolated in Vancouver. So Wednesday and Thursday I ran a few PCR reactions on samples from the CRE as well as La Push as a potential positive control. I was hoping La Push, the closest total extract I have to Vancouver Island, would contain some of the same Cercozoa but unfortunately the results of PCR indicate that it does not. Thus I have no positive control and as none of the CRE samples contained these unique sequence elements either I have no usable results. Back to the drawing board on that idea. I also attempted to determine if one of the Cercozoa primers I had would amplify rDNA from the Amazon as a qPCR results suggested. However negative control amplification due to contamination of one of the reagents has limitted work in that direction as well. Next week I will hopefully get some more promessing results.