It's Back To Bifax Extractions

I heard from Lance at IXG this afternoon. He wasn't able to get PCR results from our stippled studfish extractions, which are now pushing two years old and were stored in refrigerators rather than freezers. Since he's game to do more tries, my new task is to repeat about 15 of the extractions and get them to him soon. I admit to feeling stupid, my experience was that storing DNA in a buffer at about 4 deg. C would keep it good for a long time. The good news is that I have a bunch of extractions from years ago that I've kept frozen from a series of Fundulus diaphanus collections I made in the 90s. I'll have to throw in one of those for PCR & sequencing just to see if it'll work.

In happier news I've been curating the darter collections we've made at Estill Fork this month and last. I'm primarily interested in observering trematode gill parasites in tennessee darters, and also observing their reproductive condition. So far almost all of the snubnose darters I've examined from these collections have been tennessees rather than blacks. I also hope to look at fantail darters along the same lines.