It's Been Slow This Past Week, But We Have cyt-b Sequences!

I'm in the midst of final exams and realize that my fish wrangling has slowed down. But action percolates on the side. Kris has done yeoman work making our Fundulus heteroclitus cyt-b gene sequences intelligible. Unfortunately, we had to drop all of our sequences from Boston Harbor because they're just too messy to interpret honestly. These fish were the first ones I extracted DNA from back in 1995, and I may have screwed up the buffer to store the extractions in. But we do have good sequences from Nantucket, and from Oyster Pond in Falmouth, MA, on Cape Cod, to anchor our northern populations. Kris was able to find a complete mitochondrial heteroclitus genome at GenBank from a Sapelo Island, GA, fish so we have another deep South location to go with our Charleston, SC, fish. This sequence also confirms that the ~690 base sequence we're working with is both legit, and is the first stretch of the cyt-b gene. He's still working on trying to find more northeastern heteroclitus sequences in GenBank to make up for our lost Boston set. Preliminary phylogenetic trees tell an interesting story, but I'll wait to finish that thought until we start using all of our sequences rather than just one from each site.

My finals are going fairly smoothly to date. The only excitement is finding that one of my Vertebrate Reproduction students has turned in the take-home final exam full of plagiarized text. I can type almost any sentence from this exam into Google and find the source, not a good sign. So that's a zero for the final exam, resulting in a grade of F. I'm sure I'll hear wailing and gnashing of teeth in response to that.