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.