The Sotka Lab members have been VERY busy building a tank storage set up for the different live samples that will arrive from Japan. Paige and Lauren helped Stacy construct these bucket structures with filters below.

On May 28th, Stacy is heading to Japan to meet Dr. Sotka for a month of research in the field. They will be collecting live seaweed samples for  phenotyping and to learn more about the genetics of these foreign samples.

While Dr. Sotka has some research supplies already with him, Stacy has been packing lots of things that will help her conduct research!  

What is she bringing?

Stay tuned for more updates about their travels!

Dr. Sotka has traveled to Japan to collect algae samples and conduct research! Stay tuned for updates to come!

Sarah:
"This week I've been busy with finals, but yesterday I had my last one! Stacy worked out a great picture-taking method that reduces the glare on photos of temperature assay samples, here's an example of what one looks like..."

We've been busy planning for our upcoming trip to Japan! We've been contacting Japanese colleagues and pouring over maps to figure out where we will be sampling Gracilaria and some other inverts and seaweeds!

When not folding foil into little envelopes to weight the Gracilaria specimens or filling silica gel bags, I've been editing three manuscripts that will be submitted in the next week for review! Fingers crossed that they get accepted!

I was also awarded a small research grant through the Systematics Research Fund. There were 173 applications, but only 31 were funded so I feel very fortunate to have been awarded the funding to finish a small project I started on another invasive seaweed while I was a post-doc in the UK. I'm looking forward to adding samples from its native range in Japan and its invasive range in North American and European coasts this summer.

My mom came for a visit and she helped me take pictures of diploid (2 sets of chromosomes) and haploid (one set of chromosomes) individuals that had settled onto some PVC posts I placed out in the mudflat last year as well as weighing the algae so we can calculate the water content. With Dr. Courtney Murren, we will be analyzing these images to see whether there are differences between the three types of individuals we find on the mudflats here in Charleston. This might give us some insight into why one of the ploidies (the number of sets of chromosomes within an organisms) is more dominant than the other. Check back for updates on these small project that Courtney and I are doing!

It sure has been a crazy couple of months! I have been hard at work completing the data analysis on my research, making figures, and writing. I have also been trying to finish the molecular component of my research. Unfortunately, when I got my initial sequences back, there were nine of them that did not work. I tried troubleshooting a few different ways with no luck and spent last month trying to clone my PCR products to see if that would work. However, since my writing deadline is approaching, figuring out my molecular sequences will have to wait another month so stay tuned for info on that!

-Alyssa


Check out what a good sequence result looks like versus a bad sequence!