Hello from the Molecular lab of Team Echinacea East

Hello from Team Echinacea East!

A long long time ago on the flog many clicks away, Lara Leventhal performed an experiment to determine the amount of interspecific pollen diversity on different taxa of solitary ground nesting bees. The field aspect of this experiment occurred during the summer of 2016 this involved catching bees and wiping them on styles of Echinacea. By genotyping seedlings that were produced by wiping bees on receptive styles, we are able to determine how many different plants that the bee taxa are carrying pollen from. This requires performing plant paternity tests really means a lot of PCR work. This work has been going on for over a year, we are starting to reach the end and almost to a point of doing only reruns on samples that failed. I have not been doing this work alone, there have been many people that have worked on this project right now Michelle Chang and I have been on the molecular team, (there has been at least two people besides Laura that worked on this project).

Meet Michele! She is working on loading a PCR plate in this photo

Look its a new PCR!

We called it boxville for a reason!

Doing lab work requires well a set up lab. The College of Wooster just opened our new life sciences building that means that when I got back to school the lab was full of boxes. We had to unpack before we could do anything. This was very exciting but also was a daunting task, we have recently have finished setting up the lab and the greenhouse(oh have I not mentioned it yet there is a greenhouse attached to the lab!)