On Tuesday Cristina helped me with one of the most important (and difficult) steps of the microarray procedure. You have to take a small amount of your sample (0.04 mLs) and put it onto a piece of glass without making any bubbles or spilling, then put another really expensive ($1,000) piece of glass on top of that without spilling or splashing any of your sample. The pressure was on! Thankfully I've got some old steady pipetter's hands (for the most part). Then on Wednesday we had to take the expensive piece of glass (the actual microarray) and take it to another lab to get the data. I was SUPER nervous all morning waiting to get the data back to if the quality controls looked good. Thankfully everything came out well and I will start data analysis soon.
As soon as I finished glancing over the microarray data, I had to get ready for field work. I had most of my supplies organized but I had to go through my stuff once more to make sure everything was in order. This morning I got up at 530am, got ready and went to the lab, packed up my car and picked up my two dissection helpers, and then met up with two fisheries people (who I was able to get help from thanks to my committee member Dr. Pine) to drive to the field site.
After 2 hours in the car we made it to Perry. It took us a while to find a place where the fisheries guys could try to sample from; the water levels are still pretty high compared to the average levels. After a few unsuccessful patches we spotted a small group of mosquitofish in a shallow part of the river. The guys were able to net quite a few and then my dissection helpers and I started getting the tissues we needed.
We spent around 3.5 hours dissecting just under 50 fish while the fisheries guys went to scope out the other site. Unfortunately the other site I need fish from was even more overflown, so the verdict was that we needed to wait it out and come back to get those fish. While obviously it wasn't a perfect fishing day, I was SO glad to get the samples that we did! This is a really good start for this project and I'm confident we can get some more samples once the waters go down a bit more.
Here's a few pictures I took from today. That's all the news from me for now. After a crazy week, I am ready to lay on my floor for a while and relax...
Getting our first haul of fish at the paper mill site
...someone was watching us! (I was safely on the bridge, don't worry!)
Work is more interesting when done by the side of the road on a hot summer day :P
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