Week 3 (2009)

I realized this week that the B.neritina ovicells I was looking at did not contain very well developed embroys. E.sertula is more likely to be found inside ovicells that contain developed or developing embyros -- empty ovicells probably won't contain any bacteria at all! I spent the majority of the week correcting my mistake by doing FISH on ovicells that clearly contained a well developed embryo. I discarded all empty looking ovicells!

I'm excited because next week I will be traveling down to the coast with my frontline mentor and another graduate student in the laboratory. There, we will collect B.pacifica, another bryozoan that is related to B.neritina, but slightly more difficult to work with because their larvae are much smaller than B.neritina's larvae (haha, great). Our goal is to collect B.pacifica, as well as B.pacifica larvae, and bring them back to this lab, where I will do FISH on the samples and try to locate E.sertula. It will be interesting to do a comparison between B.pacifica ovicells and B.neritina ovicells.

GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK:
- Go to the coast with Andrew and Megan, collect B.pacifica
- Do FISH on B.pacifica samples
- Visualize results using the confocal microscope
- Continue to look at B.neritina samples that I have done FISH on, and try to locate E.sertula
- Participate in CMOP's Site Visit (the NSF is coming to the laboratory on 6/14/09  to evaluate CMOP's performance and use of funding)