February is beginning (and ending) where the first week is filled with a double snow storms flanking the beginning and end of the weekend.

Travel during this time is ill-advised, however the snow does look beautiful from afar (but not up close). Despite the impending doom of the winter, the Williams lab is still active at work!

Jacob is still continuing his research on morphologically scoring his morpholino fishes after dosing treatments. He works in the lab practically 7 days a week, and there is not a time where you can’t see him laboring over the microscope and making funny jokes. Jacob is very excited to move on to his qPCR experiment analyzing transcriptomic expression of certain genes to investigate correlation to the pattern of phenotypical changes he has been seeing. Additionally he’s also planning to send samples for tissue histological profiling as seen in one of Larissa’s prior papers.

Alex is also hands on working to set up her ChIP protocol to finally run her samples. Since the new anti-body came in and is working, the final steps are away for Alex to investigate Nrf binding to mapped ARE sequences. She is also presenting a poster this weekend at Yale Undergraduate Research Conference! Let’s hope she can get back in time through the snowstorm.

Maddie is also hard at work as well. She was able to fine tune her microinjection techniques recently and is excited to start imaging more fishes! More pictures to come.

I have also moved on towards the next section of my work while finishing up my previous section. The first step is to design primers for alas2, the gene of interest. Even though the two initial primer sets did not amplify (on both the genomic RNA and cDNA), there are reasons to suspect that changing melting temperature on the PCR machine will solve the issue. Additionally, I also just went down to Dartmouth College for an interview with a PhD program in Quantitative Biomedical Sciences. The experience was great and I am waiting to hear back on their decision.

The Williams lab is moving towards the first break of the semester in full throttle.