Hey everyone. It's been a couple weeks since my last post, I've been hard at work trying to do multiple things to get my research going:
1. Find variable microsatellites so I can conduct population genetics studies.
2. Document my various collecting sites (also known as localities) using GPS and Google Earth, so I can have exact distances between collections.
3. Begin to measure traits (phenotypes) of the Funaria I collected, because the goal is to correlate relatedness with these traits.
I've been having trouble with all three, unfortunately. For the microsats, I've been having glitches with the equipment and my materials. One of our PCR machines broke while my experiment was running, and so that got ruined. I also am having trouble finding a program that lets me do all the sophisticated distance analysis I want that is also free. Finally, measuring traits is a bit difficult due to the shapes of the organisms.
In an evolutionary sense, the "fitness" of an organism is based upon how many offspring it has. For Funaria, the obvious thing to measure, then, is the number of spores each organism produces. However, this is a pretty time-consuming operation. Since each sporophyte produces 500,000 spores, I'm hoping I can use some other measure as a proxy for spore counts. One option is to measure the size of the capsule. However, this can be a pain because the capsule of Funaria is so oblique, rounded, and asymmetric. I'm meeting with a professor who specializes in measuring organisms tomorrow, so I hope he can help!
In the meantime, my only option is to measure the spores. The way I do this is by carefully rupturing a sporophyte into a small test tube that contains exactly one milliliter (mL) of sterile water. I then remove 1/10th of that (1 microliter) and place it on a special microscope slide known as a hemocytometer. The grids on that slide will allow me to count a small number of spores and then extrapolate to the whole sample. To count, I use what I consider to be nerd beacon #2- the clicker-counter:
This little device makes me happy on a number of levels- it keeps track of how many spores I see, sure. But more importantly, it is frequently used in baseball to keep track of pitch counts. Any combination of biology and baseball is definitely one I cherish.
1. Find variable microsatellites so I can conduct population genetics studies.
2. Document my various collecting sites (also known as localities) using GPS and Google Earth, so I can have exact distances between collections.
3. Begin to measure traits (phenotypes) of the Funaria I collected, because the goal is to correlate relatedness with these traits.
I've been having trouble with all three, unfortunately. For the microsats, I've been having glitches with the equipment and my materials. One of our PCR machines broke while my experiment was running, and so that got ruined. I also am having trouble finding a program that lets me do all the sophisticated distance analysis I want that is also free. Finally, measuring traits is a bit difficult due to the shapes of the organisms.
In an evolutionary sense, the "fitness" of an organism is based upon how many offspring it has. For Funaria, the obvious thing to measure, then, is the number of spores each organism produces. However, this is a pretty time-consuming operation. Since each sporophyte produces 500,000 spores, I'm hoping I can use some other measure as a proxy for spore counts. One option is to measure the size of the capsule. However, this can be a pain because the capsule of Funaria is so oblique, rounded, and asymmetric. I'm meeting with a professor who specializes in measuring organisms tomorrow, so I hope he can help!
In the meantime, my only option is to measure the spores. The way I do this is by carefully rupturing a sporophyte into a small test tube that contains exactly one milliliter (mL) of sterile water. I then remove 1/10th of that (1 microliter) and place it on a special microscope slide known as a hemocytometer. The grids on that slide will allow me to count a small number of spores and then extrapolate to the whole sample. To count, I use what I consider to be nerd beacon #2- the clicker-counter:
This little device makes me happy on a number of levels- it keeps track of how many spores I see, sure. But more importantly, it is frequently used in baseball to keep track of pitch counts. Any combination of biology and baseball is definitely one I cherish.
1 comment:
"Any combination of biology and baseball is definitely one I cherish."
This is so you, it made me smile.
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