One word summary for arthropod week - awesome. Third week was dedicated solely to the amazing world of arthropods that includes the well-established fruitfly D. melanogaster, but the fun did not end there. With a plethora of animals ranging from insects to crustaceans to choose from, there was way too much to do with too little time! Prioritisation became key, and I focused on stuff that I was truly curious about. This included a high resolution fluorescent in situ hybridisation technique called Stellaris (introduced to the course by Matt Ronshaugen from the University of Manchester) that worked nicely ...
for which David (David Angeles of Caltech) wrote an awesome code, in about half a day (respect!), to quantify the signal being emitted here as fluorescent puncta of active transcription in each nuclei of the fly Scr segment band. Did I mention iPython Notebook is the coolest thing ever? Great stuff.
This was followed by an antibody stain of Daphnia magna, a really interesting little crustacean. The actual antibody staining did not work perfectly, and I've somehow managed to create a technicolour Daphnia instead...
This image was taken on a a Zeiss compound scope and processed using Helicon Focus. Who says you need to confocal everything??
After a weekend of recovery, we then moved on to annelids, molluscs and cephalopods. Highlight event was definitely the night-lighting organised by annelid faculty member Elaine Weaver from the University of Florida. Basically, this entails going to the dock at night, shining a light to the water and waiting patiently with nets in hand and Falcon tubes plus petri dishes at the ready for the various annelids, isopods, worms and random prawn...
At the moment we are playing around with molluscs and cephalopods (or, as Jon Henry puts it...the 'charismatic megafauna' - he is right!!), as well as gearing up for Show 'N' Tell II this Friday evening.
Stay tuned!
Sharkie