More Amplified Fundulus mtDNA

I ran a gel on Tuesday with Travis of some PCR product that Andrew had done before he took off for Costa Rica. This included three Fundulus stellifer and three F. catenatus individuals, near relatives of F. bifax. Luckily, two of the catenatus samples showed bands in the right place, so we cut the bands out of the gel for future purification. I realized afterwards that we haven't been able to assay the purity and concentration of our DNA extractions from these fish, so it's good that even two of them turned out well. Kris and Travis re-ran PCRs on the remaining four samples yesterday using the new polymerase material we received from New England Biolabs, and hopefully we'll run a gel by Monday.

I also wrote to Anna George at the Tennessee Aquarium today, asking if we could beg a few individuals of F. julisia from their breeding colony of this bifax relative for DNA extraction. Hopefully she's the right person to ask, and also hopefully they're willing to do this.

Does anyone read the magazine Seed? I love it for its somewhat goofy geewhiz boosterism of science as a key part of culture. The latest issue has a short blurb on page 36 about the new scientific field, "Neuroecology". I'd made that word up last January as the course title for a Special Topics class I hosted for a student, since he was working on examining scarlet shiner brains within our larger research project on sexual function and phenotypes among scarlet shiners. I guess I wasn't the only one to come up with the idea; the Seed blurb defines neuroecology as, "...the study of adaptive variation in the brain and in cognition." I can go with that. Our work to date has focused on what makes alpha males the way they are; the central puzzle is, do differences in brain size and structure affect the expression of sex hormones and gonadal growth, or do the expression of sex hormones and gonadal growth affect differences in brain size and structure? If you study this question in wild-caught individuals, you're definitely doing neuroecology. And I never even took a neuroscience class...