We Have Telescope Shiner Brains, And Almost Have Stippled Studfish DNA Sequences

Brittany has been soldiering away dissecting out brains from fixed telescope shiners from last year. She's getting good results, and the brains look pretty similar to scarlet shiners (not surprisingly). We'll know if we're on to anything when we take digital microscope images and measure the volume of the overall brain, and specific areas such as the vision-processing optic tectum. I'd guess we'll find differences, but if I knew it wouldn't be research.

We've been sending out PCR products of fish DNA to be sequenced at Operon. Our first studfish sample is messy but salvageable. Kris' mummichog DNA samples are more problematic, 2 kinda worked and 2 didn't. We have to arrange for Operon to use new primers and re-run the reactions to see if they'll work better.

I gave a talk to an honors science class on Wednesday about the studfish project. It went well, no one fell asleep and they asked intelligent questions. It was a good time for me to organize what we've found to date and figure out what it means.