MidBrains Debrief
The MidBrains conference was an amazing experience! I had a lot of fun talking about my research with others who are studying science. The conference had both undergraduate research and graduate research being presented, so the poster sessions had a lot of variety in the research being done. For example, Augustana College uses owl chicks to study anxiety disorders. Hearing about all the possibilities for neuroscience research made me more excited for graduate school and the possibilities for future research.
During the conference, I also got to visit a few tables during the graduate school fair. The schools were specifically from the upper midwest, and most of them were advertising their neuroscience programs. Although I don't plan on getting a PhD in neuroscience, I was able to talk to the representatives about research that is being done on their campus and ask about post-baccalaureate programs their school offers. UW-Madison, one school I have already been considering, had representatives there that gave me a lot of answers about when their applications opened and what I could expect from their program. There were a few schools I never considered before the conference, like Washington University at St. Louis. They have research labs in the graduate school that are investigating similar topics to my current research.
Continuing my Research
This fall, the main plan was to send in sequencing data from the next generation of gclm fish and decide where to go based on those results. We have run into a few problems with this, though. Initially, Dr. Carter wanted us to try a new company that is cheaper and more efficient so that we can get our data back easier. We had to make new primers for this company, and this primer is much larger than any of our previous primers. Since it is so large (about 650 base pairs), we can't run an HRMA like we normally would. The HRMA wouldn't melt everything, so we decided to try and run a qPCR reaction.
For the qPCR, we used our new primers, DNA from the fish I had sequenced this summer, and two possible mutants from our recent clutches of fish. When setting up our qPCR protocol, we had to adjust a few of the settings. qPCR denatures, anneals, and elongates the DNA, but if it isn't given the time needed for these steps, it won't turn out. What we decided to do is extend the elongation step to 2 minutes instead of 30 seconds. The hope was that this would be enough time for a larger product to form.
Unfortunately, we didn't get the results we wanted. The picture below shows the data we got back. We were expecting to see all samples melted and having its own melt curve, but only one of the twelve did. Our team isn't sure exactly why this happened. To see whether our PCR product is at the length we predicted, we are going to run an agarose gel. Since our lab doesn't normally run gels, we are in the process of learning how to do this from another lab on campus.
The hope is that we can run a gel and get confirmation that our product is present before Thanksgiving. Once that happens we can send the data to be sequenced and get results. Depending on what our data shows, this winter will be spent raising the next generation of gclm fish and sampling them for more sequencing.
Comments