Week 3

This week I have been working on processing samples taken from the ocean during a phenomenon called "red water" and from the Columbia River estuary during an estuarine turbidity maximum (ETM). An ETM occurs when the freshwater flowing out on the surface of the river mixes with the saltwater flowing in from the ocean, stirring up lots of nutrients and sediment particles.

These two sample sets--ETM and red water--should eventually yield some exciting results. So far, I have just been cleaning up previously extracted RNA samples so that they can later be reverse transcribed back into cDNA and cloned into E. Coli. At that point, the samples will be sequenced and we will be able to determine which organisms the DNA belongs to. It's a pretty involved process to find out what exactly was swimming around in the water.