It’s been a rainy and humid week here at the Williams lab, although our skills and progress continue to develop.

We started off the week with some presentations on our individual methods and techniques to keep the lab crew updated.

Larissa has been hard at work treating large sets of embryos with varying toxic materials for the continuation of her research, and has been thrilled to get back into the lab setting.

Nancy continues plugging away at microinjection and has begun to keep score of her own success rate: Go Nancy! She has also become very proficient in qPCR technique and is hopeful to dose embryos at the beginning of next week for her research project.

Jake has been busy running gels and finishing out Tam Pham’s (’15) project from this past year. He is eager to finish the work and proceed with his own project that he will continue this fall. As of Wednesday, Jake has also learned qPCR!

The confocal microscope has kept me quite busy and has been a hard yet interesting challenge. The software is quite involved and I’m finding there’s always new buttons to push or functions to adjust! However, the images are beginning to look like what we expect for data purposes, now that I have worked out a proper zebrafish mounting technique and have gotten used to the software.

We are excited to see our breeding of our sheer fish, strain with pigments knocked out, was successful and we are continuing to raise the juveniles into adulthood!

— All the best,
Michelle K.