With just one week before Thanksgiving, all of us in lab have been kicking it into high gear and churning out our first drafts of our introductions! It has been a flurry of reading, writing, and citing, but we have all been doing a great job of keeping it up!

In addition to our introductions, all of us have been hard at work getting into the lab before we leave. I have been continuing to work on my microinjecting skills, and I have gotten much better! I have been using the control morpholino to practice in an attempt to get my success rate up to 80%, so hopefully I will soon be able to move onto the nfe2-MO! Then I can move onto the task of creating scoring criteria for assessing the zebrafish cilia and neuromasts when nfe2 is knocked down. I have also made a lot of progress on imaging with the confocal, which is how I will be collecting data on the morphant fish.

In other news, Rachel received her primers this week! She eluted them and ran a PCR on genomic DNA in order to amplify alas2. Gwen has been a champion of the lab, going in at all hours of the day and night to collect embryos for her time series, which she is now using to run a Western blot. Jason has continued to dose his embryos with MEHP, and he has been scoring the resultant phenotypes.

All in all, it’s been a crazy busy week, and I think we will all be grateful to be eating some turkey really soon.

Here is an exciting confocal picture of a cluster of hair cells: