Well, this is week two of my fellowship at the Natural Science Museum. I feel like a kid in a candy shop. I do not want my externships to end. On Monday, we will actually start collecting dandelions for our experiment. I arrived at work an hour earlier in order to finish our display. Our display highlights some cool things that we will be doing at the museum. I will be heading to Prairie Ridge at 9:00.  We caught over 30 dragonflies and were totally excited.  After lunch, we saw Dr. Duke in the Animal Lab perform a simple procedure on a black banded fish. She anesthetized fish by placing him a small tub of anesthesia. We also finished working on our first museum display and planted our dandelions in our soil samples. On Tuesday, we extracted DNA from samples collected last week and learned more about PCR. The DNA process was quite lengthy. On Wednesday, we completed our first gel electrophoresis. The process went well until we placed the gel into the gel imager and realized that the bands did not show up. What a bummer! Therefore, we have to re-do the PCR and gel electrophoresis tomorrow. We also created our first soil agar. My mentor said that they have never done this before in the Genomics Lab. This went extremely well. We used 200 g of soil, 400ml of ultra pure water, and auto cleaved for about 2 hours. Next, we used .50g of sugar, 0.1 g of potassium phosphate, 7.5 g of Bacto-agar, and 130 ml of the soil extract, and 370 ml of water. We created two agars( fungi and bacteria). This was autoclaved for another 2 hours. We also looked at our plated soil samples from last week.

On Thursday, we created our PCR samples and ran our gels again.  We also learned about this cool program called MG -Rast. This programs is absolutely free and has on online repository or meta-genomes. It also allows for data analysis and has great visualizations for diversity. Every scientists that works on a project posts their data here. This is a great resource for teachers and students. Students could compare the soil in the Artic with the soil in Spain and create graphs and analyze the data statistically. Wow! We also made more soil agar, in preparation for next week’s analysis of our soil project! On Friday, we worked on writing curriculum and had a Skype discussion with Dr. Meg Lowman. She is a scientist at Cal Tech and helped to write the NSF grant for the Student’s Discover Project. We also had another lunch to discuss and summarize the week’s activities. In the afternoon, we plated more of of soil samples on four different types of agar. We also decided to run our experiment for a month, instead of just one week. Our dandelions really look good. I am truly sad that next week is my last week. I have enjoyed working in the Genomics lab with my mentors and with Laura and Amy.  Our mentors are extremely patient and excellent teachers. I have also enjoyed collaborating with the other Kenan Fellows at the museum. This has been one of the best experiences of my life and I have signed up to volunteer after my fellowship ends. I also want to apply for the “Educator’s of Excellence Grant” to go to Belize or Ecuador next summer!