Hello flog!

Out here at the College of Wooster, we have continued to be busy as bees. Seed Master Ren’s seed children are growing up – we have now planted over 80 seeds! Though most of the seeds in this batch we expected to germinate have already, our next batch of seeds will switch over from winter to summer next week, so we should have a lot more soon!

Our plant babies are growing up!!

Mia and Miyauna tag-teamed it today, starting off by running a gel on DNA isolated on Monday and some of the PCRs that have been run so far. Things came out looking pretty good! They then ran some more PCRs (I was on temporary leave as president of PCR) and prepared what is called a mix plate which will be sent off to Yale for genotyping analysis.

I basically did not step into the lab the entire day. Instead, I was helping out and learning how to do data analysis on the results we get back from Yale. For samples of an older project, I was helping to “score” the results and essentially ensure that the data were organized properly so that they can be analyzed without issue in R. So I suppose while the president of PCR was on leave, the excel expert was in the office.

As we wrapped things up for the day, we had an unexpected surprise. We share our gorgeous new science building with many other people, including other lab groups, summer camps, and freshmen orientation sessions. This week, a science camp for middle school girls represents one of our neighbors in Williams Hall. On an end of the day stockroom run, we were accosted by a group of these campers, running down the hallway. Apparently, they were on a scavenger hunt, and they asked if they could ask us some questions. They were a mix of science-related questions and Wooster-related questions, ranging from the most bountiful class of organisms on this campus to the name of our football stadium. One question they were tripped up on was where to find dihydrogen monoxide, which I think all of us got a kick out of. By the end of the scavenger hunt, they probably knew more about our campus than we did. Regardless, it was cheering to see how excited these young girls were about STEM as the next generation of scientists!

Until next time,

Avery

Hello flog!

Today we continued lab work… so I will tell you about the names that we have given all of the lab equipment.

Once upon a time when we in August of 2018 when the new Ison lab was being set up/boxes being emptied it was decided that all of the lab equipment should be named after women in STEM. Thus began the quest to find the perfect name for each equipment. The we started with Rosalind Franklin the new thermocycler. This is a perfect name for a thermocycler because Franklin is famous for her X-ray crystallography work that determined the structure of DNA. Franklin died of ovarian cancer before the Nobel Prize was awarded for determining the structure of DNA making her unable to receive the award that she deserved. Our other thermocycler we have named Martha Chase (Wooster class of 1950) worked with Alfred Hershey to determine that DNA is the heredity unit not proteins. Hershey received the Nobel Prize in 1969 however Chase did not.

Rosalind Franklin

Martha Chase

Our ever loyal centrifuge is named in honor of Chien-Shiung Wu a Chinese American physicist who was a part of the Manhattan project, and made discoveries relating to beta decay. Wu’s colleges who came up with the theory for conservation of parity won the Nobel prize when it was Wu who actually tested this theory (hmmm beginning to see a theme here).

Chien-Shiung Wu

Our hot water bath is named for Barbara McClintock a botanist (#plantsarecooltoo)! She is known for her work mapping out the genome of corn and discovered transposons/jumping genes which are genes that can move around the genome.

Barbara McClintock

Nettie Stevens a geneticist who discovered sex chromosomes and the role they play in sex determination. Stevens had a short career but an impactful one, in the nine years after receiving her PhD she published 38 papers, she then died of breast cancer in 1912. She also was one of the first to use fruit flies as a model organism. We have named our gel rig after her.

Nettie Stevens

In-Young Ahn is the first Asian woman to be an Antarctica station leader she also was the first South Korean woman to visit Antarctica. She is a benthic ecologist studying clams and other bivalves. Due to her work in the Antarctica we have named our freezer after Ahn.

In-Young Ahn

Diana Patterson is the first woman to run the Australian Antarctica station. She has written a book about her time in the Antarctica titled The Ice Beneath my Feet: My Year in Antarctica. We have named our fridge after Patterson.

Diana Patterson

Our homogenizer (shaker) is named for the British entomologist Miriam Rothschild, the company that makes the machine is “BeadBug” hence the entomologist. Rothschild was the leading expert on fleas, she was the first to understand the flea jumping mechanism that allows them to jump very far. She also did work showing how the fleas are able to alter the hormones of their host to aid in their own reproduction!

Miriam Rothschild

Ada Lovelace who we have named our lab computer in honor of, was an impressive mathematician. She wrote the first computer program and algorithm in 1850 this is known simply as “Note G”. She also argued against the existence of AI “The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform. It can follow analysis; but it has no power of anticipating any analytical relations or truths.”

Ada Lovelace

We are not quite done there are still some process of equipment that need names but we have named the majority. There are many women in STEM that have gone unrecognized for the work they have done for their field. I understand that naming a piece of equipment is a small recognition but every little bit counts and over time a difference can be made.

See ya’ in a while flog!

Mia

P.S. This Saturday I am heading out to Arizona to do field work with hummingbirds and a desert shrub Coral bean. This work will be for my senior thesis (AHH that’s scary to say/type) where I will be determining how temporal and geographic distances between plants affect matting rates. So I won’t be posting for two weeks, but after that I’ll be back! I promise to come back with stories of cactus, rattle snakes, scorpions and NO ER trips!

Hello flog friends!

We are busy here in our Ohio lab working hard, getting stuff done, and having a great time doing it!

Bright and early in our morning, I accompanied Seed Master Ren to visit our little seeds after they’re first summer night in the growth chamber.

Avery, the President of PCR, and Mia, clumsy R ninja, continued running PCRs and getting all of that DNA information.

I even got to head down with Mia to the nanodrop (which was the coolest thing ever). The nanodrop definitely gave us some very interesting results.

We then all came together with Jennifer/Dr.Ison for a very fun and informative lunch gathering.

Ren would then go to check on the seeds and plant the ones that were ready to go! Now that some are planted, we are preparing to baby them as much as possible to get them through the rough first couple of weeks.

After all of this hard work, we even had some time for a lab coat selfie!

We shall see what amazing adventures the next day holds!

Have a great day flog!

Miyauna

Hello flog!

It’s been another busy day for Team Echinacea at the College of Wooster.

Seed Master Ren started the day off by making an excursion to the garden store to hunt down some soil that will be used to plant the seeds once they have germinated and formed a radical. Then, she showed off her muscles, mixing the soil with sand and some water. Additionally, the plant growth chamber for our first group of seeds was switched over into summer mode, so we will hopefully we will see some baby plants soon!

Seedmaster Ren wrangles some dirt

Extraction extraordinaire Miyauna cranked out another grueling set of DNA extractions from some of the parental plants. Luckily though, this should be our last set of extractions at least for several weeks while we wait for our seeds to germinate and grow big enough so we can take a leaf sample.

Miyauna, getting into the extraction zone.

Our resident R expert/clumsy ninja Mia and I teamed up to begin PCR reactions with the DNA extracted on Tuesday and a batch that was extracted back in November. Each DNA sample needs to undergo 10 different PCR reactions (for the 10 different microsatellite markers being used), and after a bit of a slow start familiarizing ourselves with the methods, we ended up breezing through three PCR reactions. We also ran some gels and a nanodrop on the DNA samples to double check and make sure that DNA was successfully extracted for all of the samples.

We love PCR and gel electrophoresis!!!

After all this hard work, Team Echinacea Ohio called it a day in the lab. However, our team members still had one more important task – the noble quest for ice cream. Braving a torrential downpour, we set off for a local ice cream parlor/shop, where we enjoyed the sweet rewards of a hard day’s work.

Lab mates that eat ice cream together stay together

So long for now!

Avery