WEEK 5 (2009)

I am just over halfway done with my internship! I can't believe how quickly it flies by...

I spent the beginning of week 5 running PCRs and purifying the PCR products from B.pacifica. Now I have a few tubes ready to be utilized in cloning, a process that will allow us to sequence the bacterial genes present in B.pacifica to make sure E.sertula exists in this organism.

I also spent week 5 giving B.neritina one last chance on the confocal microscope - I set up one final FISH on 5 tubes containing B.neritina ovicells and looked at my samples through the laser microscope. To my surprise, I got a lot of great images of what appears to be cells! After spending a lot of time looking at the negatives, I am more convinced that the images I have are, in fact, E.sertula cells! It was really exciting to share these images with my mentor, who also seems convinced that the images I have contain bacterial cells!

The next step is to do the same thing with B.pacifica ovicells. I FISHed a lot of B.pacifica samples and am ready to look at them under the microscope. Hopefully finding bacterial cells will be easier on B.pacifica ovicells than B.neritina -- it took me 4 weeks to get good images with the latter species! I definitely am feeling like I am running out of time, so I hope good images will come from my first FISH (we'll see next week!)

GOALS FOR NEXT WEEK:
1) Look at B.pacifica samples under the confocal and take images.
2) Start cloning using the PCR products from B.pacifica so that I can get the bacterial genes sequenced.
3) Bryostatin labeling? (We'll see about that one!)