March at Bates is one of the busiest times of the year and for the Williams Lab team it’s shaping up to be a big month!

Larissa and Maddie are preparing to go to the Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting in two weeks. Maddie will be presenting a poster with a combination her own research on the neuromast cells, as well as otolith distance data collected by Michelle Kelley (a 2016 graduate of Williams Lab) and RNA-seq data collected by Larissa and analyzed Andrew McArthur and Briony Lago of McMaster University. Larissa will be at the conference the entire week and will busy will many different panels, presentations, and the co-chair position of the Undergraduate Education Subcommittee.

Because of an issue with the embryos over break, Jacob will be finishing the morphological scoring this next week instead. Once this is finished he can move onto the next portion of his research which uses qPCR to see the changes in expression levels of different genes when different nrf genes are knocked down with morpholino.

Alex tried her new crosslinking agent, DMA, and had little luck. She will be trying some different concentrations to see if this will improve the binding of Arnt and Ahr1b. If this doesn’t improve the western blotting results she may also try using a larger sample size.

Quang is continuing his cloning of alas2 and was able to grow up the new clone in bacteria. Besides this exciting development in his project, Quang also got into a PhD program at NC State for bioinformatics! He is waiting to hear back from a few more schools before he decides, but is excited to have gotten into a great program! Keep checking the blog for more updates in this busy month!