Sequencing and Posters
Hello again! I’m currently sitting in an airplane on my way home for fall break! I’ve been trying to update my lab notebook, but my pen just exploded everywhere and the fasten seatbelt sign is on so I can’t clean it up, so I’ll update you on what’s been going on the past few days. We’ve almost made it through the quarter at this point (just one week left) and our projects are quickly wrapping up. On Wednesday, after doing a restriction enzyme digest overnight, we ran all of our samples on a gel, and we got 11 samples that showed positive bands! These 11 samples came from six different colonies, which means we’re bound to get some kind of data, so it was a huge relief since we haven’t been having such great luck lately. We sent all the samples away for sequencing, and theoretically we should get data back today, so as soon as I land that’s the first thing I’m checking (after I see my family and everything of course)! Once we get sequence data back, we’ll be able to use the online database BLAST to match our sequence to those of similar organisms, to try to determine the species of our individual bacteria. From there, we’ll be able to create a phyllogenetic tree comparing our samples to the samples of the other people in our group, so we can finally begin to answer our original question: does phyllosphere depend on local environment or plant species? In the meantime while we wait to get our sequence data back, my partner and I have been working on creating our poster, and it looks really good so far! It needs to be done so we can print it by next Wednesday, so after we print it I’ll post a picture of the poster with some of the conclusions we came to. Next Friday on the last day of class we’ll hold a poster session so that everyone in the class can present their posters to each other and our professors. It’s exciting to see that all of our hard work over the past six weeks is finally paying off, and I’ll keep you updated on what we discover!
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- Restriction Enzyme Gel Number 1 (Samples 1, 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 15)
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- Restriction Enzyme Gel Number 2 (Samples 16 and 18)
