Me gunning some embryos!!
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Nearing the end...
Of the C.A.S. Program here at Miami... it's been a very interesting experience!! Although none of my experiments have given me adequate results yet I am not disappointed, I learned new lab techniques, and most importantly how to stay patient when nothing seems to be working!
Here's the saga:
We had problems with spawning the anemones but finally pinpointed the problem to temperature... the room we were trying to spawn them in was 20 degrees Celsius, which after thorough research I found out is too low, they will not produce gametes under 22 degrees... but after we fixed that problem, suddenly we had dying adult anemones and didn't know why! We pinpointed that to pH and salinity problems.. our seawater tank was giving us fresh water and I wasn't aware... so they were basically suffocating. I felt awful, and I am now anal about checking the salinity of the sea water...
Finally, everything is working like it's supposed to, we have embryos... but now the embryos aren't fluorescent after I gun them! What could possibly be wrong? We think that after all the traveling that the cartridges have done (Dr. Browne brought them over all the way from Hawaii) they may be no good now.. so we might have to make new cartridges!
Today is actually the first day anything has worked at all! It is a good day. The animals spawned, none died, I gunned them and they're dividing... hopefully tomorrow, I'll FINALLY have some really cool pictures of fluorescent embryos expressing the NvFoxB gene!
Well, that's all the update I have for today... I'll upload some neat pictures of some of the things I've accomplished over the past 10 weeks. =)
Here's the saga:
We had problems with spawning the anemones but finally pinpointed the problem to temperature... the room we were trying to spawn them in was 20 degrees Celsius, which after thorough research I found out is too low, they will not produce gametes under 22 degrees... but after we fixed that problem, suddenly we had dying adult anemones and didn't know why! We pinpointed that to pH and salinity problems.. our seawater tank was giving us fresh water and I wasn't aware... so they were basically suffocating. I felt awful, and I am now anal about checking the salinity of the sea water...
Finally, everything is working like it's supposed to, we have embryos... but now the embryos aren't fluorescent after I gun them! What could possibly be wrong? We think that after all the traveling that the cartridges have done (Dr. Browne brought them over all the way from Hawaii) they may be no good now.. so we might have to make new cartridges!
Today is actually the first day anything has worked at all! It is a good day. The animals spawned, none died, I gunned them and they're dividing... hopefully tomorrow, I'll FINALLY have some really cool pictures of fluorescent embryos expressing the NvFoxB gene!
Well, that's all the update I have for today... I'll upload some neat pictures of some of the things I've accomplished over the past 10 weeks. =)
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