Dis week has been crazy.

IN 1 WEEK:
The Mount David Summit!! We have all been hard at work designing our posters for next Friday! I am super excited because this will be my first ever printed out poster that I get to present at a real research conference/summit event. I am feeling overwhelmed at how quickly the end of this semester is moving, but proud of the work I have done to get me here. After talking to Gwen, Jason, and Mel in lab this week, I know they’re feeling the same.

IN 8 DAYS:
Gala!! This is not really thesis relevant but deserves a mention.

IN TWO WEEKS:
A full draft of our entire thesis is due!!

IN THREE WEEKS:
BINDING DAY!!! And also my seminar day, where I will present my research in a 10 minute talk to students and faculty of the biochemistry department! Big day.

To get ourselves through all these deadlines, we have been buckling down at our benches to finish up the lab work we need before ~binding day~. I have been doing PCR with primers provided to us by a colleague of Larissa’s, Dr. Sibel I. Karchner of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. We reached out for help due to our lack of success in amplifying alas2 thus far. I am playing around with annealing temperatures for those primers to see if I can get the right amplicon (stay tuned-don’t lose hope). We also keep amplifying a ~3,000 bp band with different primer combinations, and so we will send that band for sequencing on Monday. I am also still microinjecting with control morpholino once a week, and am up to 33% success from 16% last week! Fingers crossed for even higher rates this coming Tuesday!

In other news, Mel dosed the fish with tBOOH this week and is imaging them with the confocal. Gwen is doing ChIp with the Nfe2 antibody, and Jason is finishing up scoring/microinjecting and is starting to extract RNA for RT-qPCR. BIG things are happening over here—stick with us in the home stretch!