Week Three

This week I completed eight more RNA isolations from samples along a salinity gradient from the estuary. I also attended half of the practice NSF presentations earlier in the week as well as the entire site visit on Thursday. On a side note, I got a new OHSU ID with a photo this time in order to ride the public transportation without a hassle and organized the accumulating literature I've read. I also went over the protocol for creating a microarray with probes and spent a day generating spread sheets and graphs with the data I have thus far. Then I put them into a powerpoint and compared them to data from one year ago, as well as to the salinity, tide, and river discharge data. In addition, on Friday I listened to an interesting speaker discuss discrimination problems and issues related to indigenous tribes. As a result of that discussion, we were asked to identify our project's significance to the bigger picture/local communities. I would like to comment that my project is significant because it seeks to identify and describe the abundance of microbes in the estuary, which is important because they are the base of the food chain.

Also, over the weekend, seven of us went to Mt. Hood National Park and hiked 7 miles. It was amazingly beautiful, and not too overwhelmingly hot since we were in the shade most of the time. Thank you very much CMOP (especially Vanessa, Jami, and Nirzwan) for arranging this outing for us, seeing as how it would likely be impossible otherwise. :)