Week three of Williams lab has begun with Maine finally looking like Spring!

After two week of cold rain it’s finally about 60 and with this new energy came new success in the lab. The initial learning curve for us newbies is starting to become less steep and you can start to feel everyone falling into their own rhythm. Alex did her first full run-through of the ChIP procedure with just Jake watching and got great qPCR results! Both of them are hard at work still perfecting the ChiP protocol with the new pre-blocking and pre-clearing techniques so we hope to see their findings on these new additions. Nancy has been continuing her experiments looking at dosing with different phthalates in fish with nfr1a knockdown and morphological changes that arise from this. It a lot of time over the scope, but her hard work is paying off.
Quang again has been helping Nancy, but was also able to replicate one of the data sets given to him by Briony and Andrew. He will continue working with the data and help find new targets for study.

Derek, Michelle, and myself (Maddie) with the help of Travis Gould (who is a Physics professor here at Bates) had some breakthroughs with imaging on the confocal on Monday. He helped us change some of the settings to maximize the amount and clarity of the GFP emission we are collecting from our Brn3c fish. We were able to then see the neuromast cells and cilia projections in the developing ear which we had not been able to before. Now that we can get great images, we can continue Michelle and Larissa’s work on Nfe2’s role in ear development!

Also there was ANOTHER lab birthday! This time is was our fearless leader Larissa! We celebrated with Funfetti cake (her favorite) which was a great way to end the week.