Hello! I am Simone Henry, a rising senior at Scripps College majoring in Organismal Biology. I am from Boston, Massachusetts, but I love the southern California climate and was excited to return this summer! Outside of school and lab, I enjoy hiking and sewing my own clothes. Everyday has had new challenges and exciting opportunities to learn. I am working under Dr. Hristova and Dr. Read studying algae. Specifically cyanobacteria. The main experiment my lab partner, Briana Vega, and I are working on is testing how varied salinity affect the growth and toxicity of a cyanobacteria, Microcoleus. Our secondary project is to classify two cyanobacteria specimens. One specimen is similar in appearance to about eight genera, so we are looking into genetic details (using gene sequencing) to give confidence to which specific genus it belongs. For the second specimen, we are working on sequencing its genome, and we have guesses to which genus it belongs because of the morphological work by Dr. Hristova. It is exciting to participate on the morphological and molecular understanding of our samples. I am fairly new to molecular lab work so this has been an incredible opportunity to learn on-the-spot theoretical and practical application. After spending the first two weeks in the lab, we headed to Escondido Creek to collect some algal samples and get to know the natural location of the algae that we are spending these 10 weeks studying. On Tuesday, Briana and I completed a library prep for the Chamaesiphon-similar specimen. Library prep essentially allows us to have our isolated DNA ready to be sequenced, in hopes to genetically ID our specimen. On Wednesday we tested the quantity of DNA within our library sample. On Thursday Dr. Hristova gave us a presentation summarizing what we currently know, what we don't yet know, and how we can hopefully find out the things we don't know about the unidentified specimens. Later in the day Dr. Read gave us a crash course in the program Galaxy and helped us lay out the steps we will need to take in analysis to be able to align sequences of conserved genes of the multiple genera to find which is the most similar to our sample (the first unidentified sample). Friday, Dr. Hristova took us, with our lab technician Nate, out to La Jolla to get out of the lab a bit, as well as meet a couple of her past colleagues. We explored the Birch Aquarium and walked around the beach (picture of an very striking organism called a Velella, or a By-the-wind sailor, that we found on the beach). After some time finding anemones, crabs and isopods in the rocks on the beach, we met up with Dr. Hristova's past lab technician who is currently working at Scripps Institute and she gave us a tour of their pier (the first three pictures). It was such an honor to be able to get access to the pier and to see oceanography in the works! In the evening, the five of us met with Dr. Hristova's colleague for dinner and she gave Briana and I some invaluable tips for figuring out the process of creating a phylogenetic tree for our sample. The last picture below is the six of us out to dinner! Here are some photos from today: It has been an incredible first three weeks and the opportunities have been amazing. Massive thank you to Dr. Read, Dr. Hristova, Nate Kristan, and Briana Vega! I look forward to the rest of the summer!
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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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