PCR-waiting for 3 hours and it is a good time to catch up some blogs!
Again, My PhD mentor left me alone and went to a conference. But after 5 weeks training, I am so glad that I can finally do all the stuff by myself now. I guess that is the amazing part of the Howard Hughes Program. Because this program force me not only following thing which my mentor told me, but also learn how to think and doing experiment by myself.
Although I have worked in this lab for half year, but before this summer, most of my jobs are growing plants and measuring them (people usually call it “phenotypeing”, but it just really nothing than measuring plant.) Honestly, before this summer, I think this lab’s research is kind of “boring” because everything I am doing here is measuring plants, but through this summer, things becomes totally different and much more interesting. I start to learn the entire research process in this lab, like phenotyping, QTL mapping, trying to find gene and doing some molecular working. I guess that is real science and lab working, it is boring if you only doing one part of the whole experiments. But if you get involved into the whole process and know exactly what you are doing and what kinds of results you are looking for, things will becomes much more interesting and amazing.
OK, so, the status of my research:
My research is about involvement of Na+/H+ antiporter in the evolution of salt tolerance in Mimulus guttatus. And what we are doing is first we need to guess which gene contributes to salt tolerance thought the QTL map, after that, we need to extract RNA from the plant to check whether it is that gene or not.
My mentor finished QTL mapping before I come and he guessed one gene A might contribute to salt tolerance, and we are now checking whether A is that gene or not by extracting RNA from Mimulus guttatus and if A turns on more in salt tolerance plant than none salt tolerance plant, this means that A is the gene which contribute to salt tolerance.
We already did the RNA extraction and run it on the gel, but we failed to see the result because the control gene (elongation factor) was not showing the same color. So, rather than using regular PCR, we will use QPCR next week to see if we can get the better results.
Meanwhile, I try to figure out the sequence of the gene A in Mimulus guttatus too. So, we designed primer last week and run the PCR, half of the primers worked but the rest of them did not work. So, I redesigned some primers and try to redo the PCR this week. Hopefully this time it will work.
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This is the pic of that gene, I guess it will be cool if I post pic on the blog.
