First I would like to express how grateful I am to be here... the WEATHER is fantastic compared to Las Vegas, I have been completely spoiled!!! Hello my name is Jerrika Scott and I am in Dr. Sethuraman's lab where I have been working on DNA and RNA Extractions of Hippodamia convergens, also called the convergent lady beetle, which is commonly used for biological control of aphids. We have obtained two populations of H. Convergens from Kansas City and Palomar Mountain in California. We have used fava bean plants to feed the pea aphids, Acyrthosiphon pisum which the lady beetles consume in the campus greenhouse. We collected beetles from different life stages. Then we used liquid nitrogen to freeze the lady beetles, crushed the tissue with a mortar and pestle, then used the Direct-zol RNA MiniPrep Kit from Zymo Research to extract RNA. After that, we ran RNA Gels and used a Qubit fluorometer to test the integrity of the samples, and lastly we used an Illumina Tru-Seq Protocol to build RNA Libraries for Next Generation Sequencing. This week has been so hectic because our poster deadline was August 1st and presentations are going to be August 8th, I am so excited because this will be my first poster presentation, and we will get to show off all our hard work. Since this is our second to last week this was our last weekend together and we were able to spend some amazing quality time with each other. I am so proud of everyone because of how much progress we have made since the first day, I have had such a great time with all my lab members and mentors they have been such a great help these past few weeks. I can't wait for next week hope to see you there!!
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Watch this space for weekly updates!Every week, one of our CSUSM NSF REU students will post their blurb, summarizing their week, and chronicling our program. AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
August 2023
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