Nothing much happened during these two days, as I just continued doing my extractions, but Thursday was slightly more exciting. One of the lab members is from Colombia, and since Colombia was playing Côte d'Ivoire that day in the World Cup, she and her Colombian friends from different labs were huddled around her computer watching the game and fervently shouting at it in Spanish. This was a big change from how the lab usually is - dead silent except for whatever noises I am making with the centrifuge and whatnot - so it was quite exciting.
Also, I finally finished extracting the DNA from all the adult specimens on Thursday, and have since moved on to the larvae. This is the root of my project's purpose. Because dragonfly larvae often look vastly different from adults of the same species, it is difficult to identify how many species there are in a certain region, and as a result, one cannot determine the species richness and diversity of dragonflies in that region. This is a problem because dragonflies are very important in measuring the biodiversity and water quality of aquatic habitats, which affects the habitat's conservation status and management.
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| a larva's leg |
The two grad students who returned this week from their convention decided that I can move on from doing extractions and begin doing PCRs next week. I am excited to get the DNA sequenced soon so I can start analyzing! After the DNA gets sequenced, I'll be able to do DNA barcoding - which uses the CO1 gene to identify species - to figure out which species the larvae belong to. This information may help to further future research by allowing scientists to create more accurate dichotomous keys of larvae, etc. Hopefully, if I finish preparing everything for sequencing, I will get the chance to do this next week or the week after, whereupon I will talk more about barcoding.
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