I can’t believe it is actually 2018, but I am super excited to be back in lab and pick up where I left off!

Before winter break, I had just started to score the zebrafish embryos by injecting one group with nfe2 morpholino and the other group with a control morpholino. Then, I measured the distance between the otoliths and the otic vesicle length and width in each embryo. However, that did not go very well because the adult fish were not producing enough embryos, and the embryos that the fish did produce were not great quality. But that’s in the past because now we are all breeding new fish!!! I am now working with the Brn3c fish (which express GFP in their neuromasts), and I will be scoring them the same way I did with the previous fish, but this time I will also be scoring their neuromast quality on the confocal microscope. I have had some struggles using the confocal in the past, but I was able to get much better images last week and now I am pumped!

Everyone else is also working hard and killing it with their projects. Rachel is doing PCR with cDNA that she made from isolating RNA and with primers she designed before break. Gwen is practicing the first few steps of ChIP and treating embryos. Jason is continuing to microinject and score embryos. Go science!!!!