This past week we have been hard at work in our Marine Molecular Ecology class. On Monday we separated mussels into two tanks to begin our hypoxic/heat stress experiment. One tank was open and used as a control, and the other tank was covered and nitrogen was pumped into the water to create a hypoxic environment. Later in the week we dissected the gill tissue and placed some into a water bath to heat shock the tissue. Afterwards we extracted the RNA, ran a semi-quantitative PCR, and used reverse transcription to acquire cDNA. On Friday we placed our samples into an agarose gel to see if the hypoxia/heat stress caused the mussels to express heat shock protein 70.
Lee pipetting his samples of cDNA into the gel.
Steph pipetting her samples into the gel
Me pipetting my samples into the gel.
We viewed our results in lecture and our experiment was successful! I am quite excited that we get to finish this year with lab work, and I am not the only one who feels this way. This program has allowed us to get experience in the field and in the lab, and at the end we will be much improved scientists!
All photos taken by TA Chris Marks.
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