The finale
Our superlab finale, our final poster presentation, has quickly come upon us. Today, as Jon and Iruka have told us, we will end our project where it began: outside. Today, we will (hopefully, weather allowing) present our total data outside! Greg, Malisa, and I have tried to make our poster as pretty as possible – the more pictures and data, the better. Our poster goes into good detail of our project, but here is it in a nutshell:
1) we wanted to compare the differences between microenvironment and host identity on phyllosphere composition
2) we collected norway spruce samples from 3 different locations on campus and another group collected daffodils at the same locations near the norway spruce. We would use both culture dependent and independent methods to get a good grasp of the composition of the phyllospheres and then be able to discern whether the NS and daffodil from the same locations had more similar phyllospheres than the NS and daffodils at different locations or if location didn’t matter and the NS and daffodil had entirely different phyllosphere composition.
3) we, sadly, did not collect enough viable data to make a distinction between NS and daffodil composition (we did not collect enough DNA sequences to get a good grasp of the phyllosphere and sadly, our partners doing daffodil phyllosphere, did not collect any viable DNA sequences of bacteria)
4) HOWEVER, despite our inability to answer our question…all research projects have future directions…which, of course, can be offered up to the rising group of biology majors next year in super lab =).
FURTHERMORE, on a semi-but-not-actually related note… I have just finished listening to a Bio200 (introductory biology course that makes you fall in love with bio, become a biology major and/or biochemistry concentrator, and take superlab the following year) guest lecture by our very own Jon Wilson, and might I say, it was one of my favorite lectures yet. Say yes to Bio314, photosynthesis!