The Students Discover project is a very exciting project.  Twelve teachers are paired up with 4 scientists to develop scalable lesson plans that can be used (eventually) all over the world.  While it is overwhelming to think that the work I am doing now may one day be in classrooms in Australia it is very exciting at the same time.

 

My specific project is the Pore Mites project.  There are two known species of pore mites living on our faces, Demodoex Folliculorum and Demodex Brevis.  Folliculorum live closer to the surface of our skin while Brevis live deeper in the pores.  Not too much is known about these mites presently.  My mentor (though he doesn’t want to be called that) Dan Fergus, is working to create a phylogenetic tree showing the evolution and relationships of face mites found throughout the world.  So far there seems to be more similarity between mites from Europeans and Americans, and between African’s and Asians.  The week before we started at the museum Dan was able to sample several scientists from around the world who were in town for an international science conference.  Dan’s hope is that, with our help, he can sequence the DNA of the mites from the international scientists and fill in more information in the phylogenic tree of Demodex mites.

 

We began processing the samples this week by extracting the DNA from the samples.  Then we ran a PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to isolate the specific piece of DNA we are interested in sequencing.  The PCR has specific enzymes in it that will bind to the sequence we want and duplicate it over and over again.  The reaction is triggered by changes in temperature.  The enzymes bind to specific areas of DNA and duplicate those sequences.  After the reaction is finished we should have millions of copies of the sequence we are interested in.  Then we run a Gel Electrophoresis to make sure the PCR gave us the correct pieces of DNA.  Gel Electrophoresis will show us the length of the pieces of DNA produced by the PCR.  We can tell if the PCR worked by looking at the bands that show up in the gel.  The longer bands of DNA will stay closer to the starting point and the shorter bands will move further down the gel when electrified.  On Monday we will continue the process by placing the DNA into the DNA Sequencer.  Which will analyze the nucleotides in the DNA and give us the sequence of each sample.  Then we can use a computer program to compare these new sequences with others that we already have and add them to the evolution tree.