Worms and Week One!
It's Friday and officially the end of week one of the 8 week Howard Hughes program-- time is flying already! I'm excited to be back at Duke, and I can already tell this is going to be a fun summer. Like everyone else in this program, I've just finished up my first year here in hot and humid Durham, NC-- which is much warmer than my home town in the Boston area. I'm breaking a sweat just looking outside.
Moving on to more relevant things, for my first blog I'm going to give you all the low down on my lab. In the future I want to be able to post about all of the fun people here in the program as well, but seeing as its early still, I'll have to keep you waiting on that. (As a side note, a couple of us are going to see "The Hangover" tonight, which I hear is supposed to be very funny...)
This summer I'm working in Dr. Ryan Baugh's lab researching the lovely C. Elegans (worms!). He and his team have been incredibly welcoming and helpful already-- they rock. On the research side of things, we're working on certain elements the worm's developmental genomics i.e. how they go into arrest when they lack food, and how their bodies work to survive during arrest and are eventually able to revert to normal physiological states when conditions are suitable for growth.
In this action-packed picture, Brenda, who helps keep our lab running, watches me look at plate of worms. In the background is Ilka, another rising sophomore working on the same project as me. She is a part of a different summer program, the name of which escapes me.
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My principle investigator (PI) was M.I.A. at the time of this photo session, so I'll get a picture of him posted later. Finally, this is an agar plate of C. Elegans. I use plates like these to run all sorts of experiments.
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See the worms? Of course not, because I’m terrible at taking pictures. They are tiny, but they’re there, and with practice I should be able to find these buggers with ease.
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Anyway, it's well past midnight now, and we're all back from "The Hangover", which was amazing, so it's time for bed. Thanks for reading!
-Tucker
