WEEK 7

Last Saturday Ethan took the interns up on an amazing hike to Mt. Hood. It was a beautiful day and the scenery was breathtaking. The only disappointing thing is that when I got my camera out of my bag, I realized my battery was dead...awesome. But it turned out to be okay because everyone else took tons of pictures. We hiked up to nearly 7,000 ft where we ate lunch in a quiet meadow scattered with wildflowers and streams from the melting ice. Then Ethan took us up a bit higher to glycade (slide down on our butts) down some of the steeper snow slopes.  We had to go up some pretty intense, rocky patches but it was all worth it when we got to the top and slid down. I had a bit of an incident when I accidentally started sliding down the slope without meaning to…. This resulted in some serious speed and at one point I was sliding backwards and nearly doing somersaults down the mountain. Ha ha although I was kind of freaking out when I couldn’t control my speed or direction for awhile, it was worth it because it was so much fun!  I definitely want to go back and spend more time relaxing in the meadows, sliding down the slopes and enjoying the views.

Overall this week has been more positive than last week. I tried using the new Myrionecta primer with the red water samples from 2007 and 2008 and it worked once and didn’t work the next time. I went ahead with the PCR product that worked and used chemically competent cells to grow the sample on LB-AMP-Xgal plates. There was transformance and the samples will be sent to the primate center for sequencing over the weekend.

I had even better luck when working with the Rubisco cryptophyte primers. We reread the original paper that worked with Rubisco primers and altered our PCR cycle to match theirs (the main difference was a decrease in the annealing temperature). Using a 50X dilution of the 2007 and 2008 red water extract, the PCR reaction worked! These samples will also be sent to the primate center for sequencing.

I am excited to get the sequences back next week and blast and align them to see what we have!