We have just entered our last third of the summer!

It’s crazy how fast time is flying by. Everybody has been working extremely hard. Larissa has spent most of her time pipetting to make DNA, in which she has completed a student’s years worth of work in a matter of 3 weeks. She’s really working hard to get samples ready for high-throughput sequencing! Jake worked really hard at designing his primers, and they recently came in the mail. I’m excited to see what kind of results he will get in the next two weeks. Michelle has spent some time learning the ropes of microinjections. It’s been interesting watching her progress, especially since not too long ago, I was in her position. Also, her imaging library is also growing day by day, and I’m excited to see how her user’s guide turns out!

A lot has been going on for me, as I’m always on my feet and ready for the next task. I spent most of my time dosing MEHP. I finished dosing the wild type fish, nrf1a knockdown fish, and nrf1b knockdown fish. On top of that, each day I juggle my duties of extracting RNA, synthesizing cDNA, and running qPCR. I have one more of group to dose (nrf1a and nrf1b knockdown), and I hope finish running and analyzing my data for all these sets by the end of my summer research time. Thus far, my preliminary data for the wild type set looks pretty good, and once I figure out the best housekeeping gene for this set, I’ll be ready to analyze the data. I am very excited to see where this project will go!