Hi everyone! This week in the lab the volunteers have been working hard to progress with the Echinacea Project! This morning Art demonstrated and explained how to use the x-ray machine to identify whether achenes have embryos inside of them or not. During the rest of the day I worked on cleaning, counting, randomizing and rechecking achenes. These are the steps the achenes must be go through before they can be x-rayed and weighed. The past two weeks have gone very smoothly and we are now on our 6th (out of 12) bag of Echinacea heads that are in the process of being cleaned. Thanks for reading! 🙂
Thanks for the update! I’m glad to hear things are going smoothly in Illinois. We are making progress though yesterday we got rained out (and thoroughly chilled).