Science in the City

 
After getting a significant chunk of work done starting the seagrass barcoding effort, late-breaking developments have changed the course of our work to come.  The CBOL, an international body organizing the efforts of individual institutions, published results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggesting the use of a two-loci standard genetic [...]

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It’s the end of the Fellowship here in Australia, and time at last for me to get home to my bride and baby, who’ve been struggling along on their own back home.  It’s a time of change, and it is in such leave-taking moments that I’m mindful of how transient life is, how fast it [...]

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After hitting a bit of a down note on Tuesday, I spent most of Wednesday and Thursday tidying up affairs in and around the lab.  Unlike my work at the Chang lab in NYC, the space and materials at JCU were shared, and so a careful cost-accounting of my activities had to be undertaken, from [...]

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The follow-up to the successful first sequencing of the RpoB and RpoC loci on Monday has been a hurried attempt to get as many of the loose ends from the other genetic ’sites of interest’ processed as possible in the time I have remaining at JCU.  With the experience I got going through the first [...]

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 After hundreds of steps and five weeks of effort, today we anxiously awaited the results from the sequencing lab, which would be the final arbiter of the success or failure of our efforts so far.  As it was pointed out to me today, there are a number of things one has to do between the [...]

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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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