Last week our three seniors, Jake, Michelle, and Nancy, all graduated.

They had a beautiful day for graduation, and we are all excited for them to start off on their new adventures. We will miss them dearly!

I am still working on optimizing our ChIP protocol. Our last trial appeared very close to optimization but we could still see some room for improvement. We’re now fluctuating incubation times and rearranging the order of antibody, antigen, and bead binding during immunoprecipitation. Hopefully in the next week or so, we will have all of the bumps smoothed out. I’m looking forward to some real data collection!

Quang has made huge strides with his bioinformatics project. He’s created lists of 200 + genes which are differentially regulated at certain points across different strains and timepoints. He’s now working on clustering those genes by their functions.

Maddie and Derek are also continuing to make strides on their otolith (inner ear) project. They’ve become pros at some pretty difficult techniques- microinjection and dechorionating! This week, they developed a scoring method for their images and are getting started on some qPCR. It’s looking like they’ll be collecting publishable data really soon! Here are some of the images they’ve collected:
They use fluorescence to tag GFP and illuminate the hair cells.