11/14/11
Today was another information packed day at NYSM. Of course, the day could not be started without problems, including stand-still traffic on 787. However, I made it to NYSM relatively on time (scaling the escalators at an astonishing speed, and even having to make a quick retreat off a rapidly ascending escalator after going up one floor to many), and quickly got to work. With my new-found pipet-wielding skills, I was able to help Dr. Kirchman to begin extracting the DNA from rail birds from the Solomon Islands. I was a little nervous about working with the rail bird tissue, because unlike the ample amount of thrush tissue on hand at NYSM, the Solomon Islands were pretty far away and so was more rail tissue. Before the actual lab work began, Dr. Kirchman was able to show me a picture of the DNA we had extracted from the thrush birds the previous week. Using a type of gel whose most likely long and complicated name escapes me, the DNA was able to glow when exposed to ultraviolet light. The picture Dr. Kirchman had taken showed a brightly glowing strip at the top of the test tube. This was good, because not only did it prove that the test had worked, but also that we were able to extract DNA from the very small tissue samples of the thrush birds, similar in size to the tissue samples of the rail birds we would be using. The DNA was located near the top of the test tube, because over time, the long strands of DNA get chopped into smaller and smaller strands. These smaller strands are able to quickly move through the liquid with the DNA in the test tube and sink to the bottom, so thick glowing blocks at the top of test tubes are indicative to high quality DNA. Since the tissue samples from the thrush birds had been collected fairly recently, the DNA strands were still long and had not sunk to the bottom of the test tube. After examining the picture, it was off to work, and I was able to get some more time with my favorite pipets. However, there were a few technical difficulties as the machine I solely know as the 'milkshake machine' (thank you Dr. Kirchman for giving me names I can remember :D) which breaks open the cells inside the tissue and basically just shakes the test tube all over the place so as to expose the DNA, had not been fastened down tight enough and one of our test tubes cracked. We tried to salvage most of the DNA mixture out by transferring the liquid to another test tube with a pipet, but we will not know how successful we were until we use the gel to see if we saved a large enough portion of DNA from the cracked tube. On the bright side, my DNA extraction expertise has reached a new level (if you can consider two days of experience a new level) and I am excited to see how the results of our lab work turned out the next time I see Dr. Kirchman.
Monday, November 14, 2011
Monday, November 7, 2011
First Day!!!
11/7/11
Today was my first day working with Dr. Jeremy Kirchman at the New York State Museum. The day was filled with new experiences, between my first ride on a shuttle (which presented some initial difficulty and worry at first between being afraid of missing the shuttle, not knowing what it would look like etc. but it was luckily a problem easily overcome), my first time on the third floor of the museum (an area of the museum off-limits to your run-of-the-mill visitor), and yes, surprisingly my first time attempting to extract DNA from bird tissue and blood samples. Dr. Kirchman told me that our project for the year would concern a type of birds called rails. Though some species of rail can fly a little, many of the birds located upon islands off the coast of Australia in the Pacific Ocean are flightless. This is mainly because these island-dwellers have the ability to be ground nesting birds since they have no predators on these islands along with rails having very thick strong legs built for carrying them along the floors of their biomes in search of food. Dr. Kirchman had spent a considerable period of time developing a phylogenetic tree, tracing back the common ancestors of the rail birds. However, he discovered that while many of the rails of the same genus were located right next to one another on the phylogenetic tree, a genus of birds located in the Solomon Islands were not grouped closely together. Our project for the year is to retest DNA samples of these rail birds and determine if this puzzling piece of information is simply the result of an error, or the some other abnormality that occurred in these creatures' history such as inbreeding. However, since this is my first time working with DNA in a lab, Dr. Kirchman and I worked on extracting DNA from the tissue and blood of thrushes today. While the time flew by pretty quickly, I was still able to get a general idea of the process of extracting the DNA from cells along with getting a chance at using a pipet. I am nowhere close to becoming a pipet expert, but luckily I was able to yield my pipet without completely destroying our samples or simply wreaking havoc. Next week, we are planning on continuing our exploration of DNA and hopefully the time will not go by as quickly.
Today was my first day working with Dr. Jeremy Kirchman at the New York State Museum. The day was filled with new experiences, between my first ride on a shuttle (which presented some initial difficulty and worry at first between being afraid of missing the shuttle, not knowing what it would look like etc. but it was luckily a problem easily overcome), my first time on the third floor of the museum (an area of the museum off-limits to your run-of-the-mill visitor), and yes, surprisingly my first time attempting to extract DNA from bird tissue and blood samples. Dr. Kirchman told me that our project for the year would concern a type of birds called rails. Though some species of rail can fly a little, many of the birds located upon islands off the coast of Australia in the Pacific Ocean are flightless. This is mainly because these island-dwellers have the ability to be ground nesting birds since they have no predators on these islands along with rails having very thick strong legs built for carrying them along the floors of their biomes in search of food. Dr. Kirchman had spent a considerable period of time developing a phylogenetic tree, tracing back the common ancestors of the rail birds. However, he discovered that while many of the rails of the same genus were located right next to one another on the phylogenetic tree, a genus of birds located in the Solomon Islands were not grouped closely together. Our project for the year is to retest DNA samples of these rail birds and determine if this puzzling piece of information is simply the result of an error, or the some other abnormality that occurred in these creatures' history such as inbreeding. However, since this is my first time working with DNA in a lab, Dr. Kirchman and I worked on extracting DNA from the tissue and blood of thrushes today. While the time flew by pretty quickly, I was still able to get a general idea of the process of extracting the DNA from cells along with getting a chance at using a pipet. I am nowhere close to becoming a pipet expert, but luckily I was able to yield my pipet without completely destroying our samples or simply wreaking havoc. Next week, we are planning on continuing our exploration of DNA and hopefully the time will not go by as quickly.
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