Science in the City

Of all the days I’ve spent these past few weeks in the lab, today was perhaps the most intense.  There were several factors contributing to the stress level.  First is that I was again undertaking procedures I hadn’t done before as I moved through the various protocols.  Secondly, time is getting short, and there’s no [...]

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Aware as I am that the inexplicable enthusiasm of the practitioner of any obscure hobby or field usually meets with raised eyebrows and questioning of one’s sanity, I thought I’d add a few interesting links that provide a broader context for the work I’m doing here at James Cook University.  If you don’t believe me, [...]

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he last few days in the lab have finally begun to yield useful results, punctuated with what felt like many little false starts along the way.  After a couple days away from the lab, I returned on Monday to find that I was all thumbs again, doing things mostly correct, which in a biotech context [...]

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This weekend, I had several activities to do, related to my work at JCU, if not directly applicable to my sea grass project.  Besides from continuing to work through readings and refreshing my understanding of the Hardy-Weinberg principle, we had a dinner meeting with local SRP-Australia supporters, a visit to the Reef HQ Aquarium and [...]

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After Thursday’s success, there was genuine excitement to begin processing the samples collected at Shelly Beach. Combining the new samples with those recently brought back from Green Island and the Low Isles, the DNA barcoding project now includes a fairly comprehensive collection of the sea grasses of the Northern Queensland coast.  But despite our enthusiasm, [...]

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After failing to retrieve useful samples of either Zostera or H. spinulosa on my trip to Magnetic Island, there was a flurry of discussion in the lab about where else these specimens may be collected locally.  Since the tides are on an unusually low cycle, GPS waypoints that normally are further out in the channel [...]

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Today I joined the team of a different postdoc to piggy back along on their field collecting trip to Magnetic Island, located just off the coast from Townsville.  They were undertaking many of the plant physiology experiments that I saw happening on Green Island.  My task, besides providing heavy equipment lifting, was to seek out [...]

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esterday, after assembling the full seagrass team in the lab for the first time since my second day here, we paused to process the samples collected on the Low Isles before proceeding with any of the DNA sequencing.  The idea is to get all of our extracted samples into a single batch, in order to [...]

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Since JCU is on inter-session, the campus is relatively empty and quiet.  This brief calm has lulled the animals from the hilly ranges around the Uni to come down and graze on the school’s lawns.  Among the creatures preferring tender shoots of grass to the desert scrub of the hills are a certain mob of [...]

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After running the PCR reaction, a check of the results by gel electrophoresis indicates that for most of the samples, the reactions were successful in amplifying the DNA collected in the field.  The dark bands on the light field on the image indicate the location of genetic material.  The weak signal on the first region [...]

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