Week 1. Semester 3. Here we go again!!

This semester I will not be working in the Palo Verde project anymore, although I plan to continue working on the fungal exoenzyme isolation part of it on the side. Over the summer I had the opportunity to join Dr. Cotter's project on Legionella, so I will continue to work with her. We perform sample collections, DNA extractions, PCR amplifications, and analyze banding with electrophoresed agar gels and SyberGreen under UV light. For this semester, the plan is to take our findings one step further and confirm our results with genetic sequencing! The project data will be reported back to join more data from a bigger project to hopefully better understand the genus and how we become affected by its presence in water systems. This week the team will be meeting Friday, so check back next week for an update.

*Photo courtesy of CDC.gov
(http://www.cdc.gov/legionella/index.html)