This week I did some lab work (Yay!). I did a full DNA extraction of a heather beetle and then amplified it by performing PCR and sequenced it to find whether a microsporidian (a micro-parasite) has infected it. Now this was a pretty long multi-step process and involved me playing around with a number of cool machines and materials (liquid nitrogen ftw :P ). Even though I made one mistake and had to repeat the last step of the process (could have been my ingenious plan to spend more time in the lab...) I completed the whole process and got great results so am pretty proud of that. Active learning through participation is the best!
For those interested in learning how DNA sequencing works, I found this cool site that has videos which give a brief introduction to DNAprocesses: http://www.dnalc.org/view/15924-Making-many-copies-of-DNA.html
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