We’re back!

Second semester started last week and we’re all back in the lab for our final semester of research and of being students at Bates! It’s pretty surreal that we’ve been in the lab for almost a year now and are leaving Bates so soon. This Monday we all attended our last Bates MLK day which was full of wonderful speakers and programming. This year’s MLK day theme was reparations with a keynote address given by Kahlil Gibran Muhammad from Harvard Kennedy School. In his speech he reminded us of the importance of learning and teaching American racial history and current events. We then enjoyed a day full of workshops run by students and guests and ended the day with the annual Sankofa performance.

In lab, we’ve all formed final project goals for the semester and are working hard to wrap up our work in the next few months. Larissa is working on developing a morpholino for cfap70 and cloning to gene to do in situ. Maddie is getting ready to inject embryos with an nfe2 morpholino and collect images at 48, 72, and 96 hpf of toxicant treated and untreated animals. She is also still working on getting some amazing inner ear pictures with the scanning electron microscope. Jacob is working to finish up his morphological scoring so that he can run some qPCR on the scored groups and send out samples for histological analysis. Quang is going to be performing a gain of function assay to see if injecting ALAS2 mRNA (shown to be downregulated in the absence of Nf22) into nfe2 knockout embryos will rescue hemoglobin function. Finally, I (Alex) am completing the final few steps of optimization on our ChIP procedure so that I can collect the data needed to complete our Ahr project. Keep checking back for weekly updates on our projects this semester!