Late Winter Research; Good Thing We Have Fish!

It's been a mad-dog week for me workwise, since I've given two exams in my Biology 2 classes which of course means I have to grade them in some good time. That's what I largely did today. But things are still percolating on the side for research.

Kris has been working on the PCRing of more mummichog DNA. We have 6-8 samples ready for sequencing, and now we have two more rounds of product waiting for good gels to be run for assessment. We ran a gel today with 6 samples on it, but the student I let load the gel apparently injected the PCR product too deep in the gel and after ethidium bromide staining the lanes formed a strange fan pattern sitting on an arc of stained DNA. It wasn't very informative, and Kris will re-do it tomorrow. But even so I think I saw two or three real bands in the confusion.

The work on scarlet shiners could take a sharp turn for quick resolution. We realized that rather than do an antibody staining of histologically prepared brain tissue samples to visualize NMDA receptors, we could run western blots of brain tissues and come up with the same information. This is easier for us because Enrique and Rebecca have western experience, and the Bishop lab we're working in is set up to run westerns without any undue effort. So hopefully we can get these blots run in just a few weeks, and see if our hypothesis is right that males have a high, invariable number of these neuronal receptors while females vary hugely with age and reproductive condition. These receptors are key parts of fish brain circuitry for successful reproduction.

Next post I should be able to display our most current map of flame chub distribution in Alabama based on our field work. Kevin has come up with a good design for the map. Now all I have to do is to finish writing my article summarizing our research. Really, I will!