Fish Brains In Process

Andrew, Taito, Brittany and Alexandra all worked on various aspects of fish brain measurement today. They defrosted the telescope, silverstripe and tennessee (1) shiners, removed the brains and put them in a lysis buffer with protease inhibitor, sexed the fish (tough out of season, by definition) and worked on measuring the brain size of other fish collected at the same time but fixed in formaldehyde. It's some serious biology done in a burst of activity. They ran concentration assays on the lysate solutions with brains, and got protein readings up around 35 micrograms per milliliter which is impressively high. Tomorrow they'll start trying Ernie's "spotting" technique for western blotting, which will hopefully work well since it would be a serious shortcut in the process.

The last piece of this process is fresh scarlet shiners which we'll go out for tomorrow afternoon at Limestone Creek. This is the end of the "nonbreeding" season, spring is just beginning to really kick in locally.