Hey everyone! So you may recall that I went down to the University of South Florida before the holidays to look at the chemistry of my seaweeds, and I am happy to say that it was a great trip! With the help of the students in Dr. Baker's lab, I was able to run extracts of my seaweeds on an instrument called a Mass Spectrometer, which basically separates chemical compounds based on their mass. I now have a list of over 35,000 compounds that are found in my seaweeds, which is a lot! We are still trying to figure out an easy method to identify the compounds since the mass spec just gave us their masses, not their names, but a quick analysis on the compounds indicated that there were some differences in the types of compounds based on seaweed division (brown vs. red). Dr. Baker's lab also provided me with one more antarctic red seaweed, so the first thing I did when I got back to Charleston was run one final feeding assay and do my character trait assays on that seaweed. Since the holidays, I have completed all my trait assays and am in the final stages of generating DNA sequences from all my seaweeds. In the next few weeks I will be generating a molecular tree for my seaweeds (essentially a family tree) and will be working on trying to analyze and understand what all my data says!

-Alyssa

I've been collecting two different generalist herbivores that we are going to use in feeding experiments with Gracilaria vermiculophylla to see if the the herbivores like eating the seaweed or are repelled by it. One of them is an amphipod called Ampithoe valida, and the other is an invasive isopod called Synidotea laevidorsalis. We are unsure whether or not the isopod eats the Gracilaria so we will be running trials after we collect enough herbivores. Right now the cultures of the animals are in my house and living in a small, makeshift aquarium!

-Paige Bippus

This past week I exposed some Gracilaria samples to a range of temperatures between 30-50 degrees Celsius by putting them in the Thermal Cycler that we use for PCRs. One set of samples was exposed to the temperatures for 15 minutes and the other set for 30 minutes. We then cultured the samples in the wet lab for a week and checked them every other day. The samples exposed to the highest temperature (50) were completely bleached after a week, so it looks like this is the upper range of temperatures they can tolerate. We are still playing around with culturing methods and different ways of exposing samples to different temperatures.