Hi Everyone!
My name is Jess and I’m also a junior Biology major. So Paul wasn’t kidding when he said he makes really bad jokes- but it’s ok to be dorky in lab 
I guess I’ll begin by picking up where Paul left off. This quarter we are working with the model organism Chlamydomonas reinhardtti – a form of green algae that look like tiny critters with flagella that swim! We’ll subject them to different environments to see how it effects the organism. Afterwards, we’ll obtain mRNA and use microarray technology, which is basically a tiny chip with spots of RNA or DNA to represent the genes in a genome, to figure out which genes are turned on or off at different stages of an organism. One thing that’s really cool about this project is that we get to choose what variables we want to manipulate in the chlamy according to our own interests. It’s pretty awesome!