SICB!

I traveled with my lab to the SICB conference in Charleston, South Carolina! We all presented our research and had a really great time. Definitely an amazing experience. I felt like a real scientist!

Summary of Current Research

So basically, this picture sums up a lot of the things I've been doing for the past couple of months. I'm sure that seems a little odd, but this is one of the most important photos I have from my research. This is the construct that I have been dealing with for the past two years, which is the NvFoxB gene upstream of a region driving the expression of an orange fluorescent protein.

All my previous research has been with this construct. I have injected embryos with the unmodified construct, which revealed that the construct has all the elements necessary to drive the expression of the orange fluorescent protein. That's all my research from the C.A.S. program.

I then dived into working in more of an "abstract" way with the construct. I analyzed the NvFoxB gene (in this picture, it's the teal color) in two sequencing databases, Jaspar and Possum. I was searching for possible TATA binding sites encoded within this gene. The programs gave me three places that had a high probably of being a TATA binding site (these are in dark blue).

I then took all this data and began using ApE, a sequence analyzing program. I searched for restriction enzymes that would cut the construct in specific places, separating these possible TATA binding sites (the dark purple colors are the restriction enzymes I chose).

That's pretty much what this picture is showing. From this, I now have to build my own constructs, which is turning into a crazy fiasco as all my experiments have just epically failed, mostly because I'm a goofball and end up messing up really simple things. Such as autoclaving petri dishes... who does that? Me. We have a little corner where we're putting all the "this is what you DON'T DO" examples, and all of them are from me so far... pretty embarrassing!

The Browne Lab Website!

Check it out!

http://www.bio.miami.edu/wbrowne/BrowneLab2/Home.html

RCIF!

So back in March, I participated in the Research, Creativity and Innovation Forum at the University of Miami. It's a conference where both undergraduate and graduate students get to present their research in a peer reviewed setting. It was incredibly nerve racking, I'm awful at presenting but it was an incredible experience and I'm so glad I took part in it!

Finally, an update!

Wow I am seriously slacking with updating this! I'll try to be better about that this year. No promises, though.

So basically, I am a senior at UM now. Crazy! I'm hard at work in the lab this year pursuing my senior thesis in time for graduation in May. I'm a little daunted by the amount of things I have to accomplish before then, but I'm going to try my best, that's all I can do!

Here's to this year!

My first gel!!

Ran my first gel! (well, I messed up a few times so this is really my third gel...)

Pictures!!

One of our adult Nematostella with an egg mass. Adorable!



Me gunning some embryos!!

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. =)

Great Day!

Despite the very, very awful couple of days I've had in my personal life, my day at the lab today was fantastic. I'm still going to be here for a few more hours, I'm spawning some anemones that won't be ready until about 10 PM tonight... but so far today has been amazing here. Ate lunch with my best friend Vicky and then came back to the lab to take some time lapse/photos of one of my polyps... and it came out great!!

As you can see, he is HUGE!! This picture makes him kind of look like a catfish... He was extremely friendly, and was cracking me up for the 2 hours I was taking pictures of him.

His tentacles are growing bigger which is a great sign!

Doesn't he look like a puppy? They melt my heart, for something microscopic this anemone is one of the cutest things I have ever seen.


The pictures below are when I started dying of laughter.


Poor baby actually scared himself so bad that he retracted all his tentacles inside his body! It was so adorable- since he's so young he's still not in complete control of his motor functions so he was testing out his reflexes and actually scared himself so bad he tried to hide. One of the funniest things I've ever seen, I even got some time lapses that are sure to give you a good laugh.


I've been super busy but I am having a good time, it's hard work but it's a lot of fun. Enjoy all these photos and videos!! Next week is when I start shooting embryos with the gene gun... Then the anemones will be bright orange!! Exciting stuff!!

New Videos and Photos

Got two new time lapses up and some pretty cool photos!

Polyp Photos

Photos of a juvenile polyp from my spawning a couple of days ago. He wasn't as friendly as the one from March but the photos came out decent. I like the time lapse better personally, definitely check that out!

Polyp Time Lapse

A quick time lapse of a polyp from my spawned embryos from the other day, he wasn't as friendly as my polyps from March but the video came out pretty cool anyway!

2nd Time Lapse!

These are the time lapses I did last night... they turned out okay, unfortunately the embryos moved all over the place over the 10 hours, hopefully next time we do the time lapse we can somehow anesthetize them and make them stop moving so we can get a really good development sequence.

Pretty cool though! For such small little balls of cells they move ridiculously fast.

My First Time Lapse!

Baby Nematostella!!

My baby Nematostella! These are also images from March, but they're my favorite... aren't they cute?





He's waving hello!!





Cool beans, huh?

Embryos!

These images are from back in March... these are little baby Nematostella!! The second photo you can see the cilia really well, the other two are just some nice photos of the entire little ball of cells.

Where the Magic Happens!

This is the very intense microscope I use for my data collection!! It is worth much more than I ever will be, and does so many things that when I sit down I barely know where to begin!! I have a lot of fun pressing all the buttons and seeing what happens.

In this picture a slide is all set up, I'm actually taking some time lapse and Z-stack data on my embryos I spawned yesterday, the first couple of images looked good and it will be running all night, I don't even have to do anything until tomorrow morning! This microscope is amazing!

Hopefully I can upload some images from my test run tomorrow! I'm still not sure how to get my images from the computer OFF the computer... The simple things in life that I have trouble with...

First Spawning of the Summer!

Began spawning Stack 6 today! Here they are... no, they don't look like the anemones from Finding Nemo but they're related! I want to get a close up picture of one of the Nematostella but my camera phone isn't very good at taking good pictures...

Tomorrow I'm doing the test run of our multidimensional acquisition data with these embryos so hopefully I'll have some cool data to post on Friday!

CAS Research Award

I got the CAS Research Award!! I found out that I was one of the 6 chosen out of about 50 or 60 applicants... pretty exciting!! I'm in Miami now working on the project... hopefully lots of updates will be posted in the next 10 weeks!!

Information!

First post, just some background information on what exactly this... "blog"... is really all about!

Basically, I decided I wanted to keep a website with updates on my Undergraduate research projects, and hopefully continue this in the future with my graduate and post-graduate projects. I am a Sophomore at the University of Miami, and I recently became involved in the Undergraduate Research department, and have really fallen in love with what I do. In essence, I want to share my research projects and education and hopefully inspire at least one person, hopefully more, to go into the research field. Although I am personally Pre-Med, I believe that a background in research is vitally important if you want to go into the medical field. By participating in research as a medical professional, you can make an incredible contribution to not just one patient, but to people all over the globe, something that I find incredible. I want to be a part of finding the cures for the diseases I will (hopefully) be diagnosing in the future, not just sitting idly waiting for others to accomplish these feats. I believe every medical professional should be participating, because really who knows debilitating diseases better than the people who are constantly trying to help patients with these diseases every day of their lives? Just my personal opinion.

So what exactly do I do right now? I am part of the team lead by Dr. William Browne, who specializes in invertebrate developmental biology, as one of his Undergraduate students. I am learning basic microscope and lab techniques, and working specifically with the specimen Nematostella vectensis, or the sea anemone. As I continue working on my undergraduate thesis I hope to gain strides in understanding the embryonic neurological development of these creatures.

So far that's it! I'll continue updating every so often with pictures and information. Hope you enjoy!