Hello!

The last few weeks of my summer research have been dedicated to the third component of my project, analysis of bacterial community composition. This is done through T-RFLP, or terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism. In order to do this assay, I first had to extract DNA, and I am still in the process of making sure I can get good amplification so that I know I have enough DNA with which to work. I am leaving campus tomorrow to prepare for a family trip, so I probably won’t be able to do T-RFLP until I resume research in the fall. However, I have still gotten some exciting results despite some setbacks in this part of my project.

[Read more…]

Hi guys!

Here’s some additional information on how my project has been going. First, though, I would like to do a recap of what I am working on. There are three major components involved in acquiring data for my project: I used a tritiated leucine assay to determine bacterial production; I used epifluorescence microscopy to enumerate bacterial and viral abundance; and I am currently doing DNA extractions to prepare for T-RFLP assays, which I will use to determine bacterial community composition (this shows how diverse the bacteria in my microcosms from Lake Matoaka are after being exposed to different treatments). I will talk more about T-RFLP later, but here is a description of epifluorescence microscopy and the results from the tritiated leucine assay.

[Read more…]

This is a blog I had been writing last week, but I got so caught up in my trial run and project preparations that I never got around to posting it. Last week during the KCN trial run and yesterday during the set-up of my microcosms, I ran into some obstacles that required some modifications of my project, which I will explain later. Overall, though, filtration and set-up ran very efficiently, and my project is now underway!

[Read more…]

Hello!

It has now been two weeks since I began my summer research in the Bacteriophage Ecology Lab at William & Mary. I have spent this time reviewing articles and books for ideas as I’ve prepared the details of my experimental protocol. I have also shadowed some lab techniques that I will be using for my experiment once I have collected samples and set up microcosms, which will be incubated in the lab. On Monday, June 6, I learned to use tangential flow filtration to obtain filtrates and concentrates with which to create treatments. Other lab members have shown me how to prepare slides for enumeration via epifluorescence microscopy. I will later explain these lab techniques in further detail.

[Read more…]