Linksvayer Lab: mid Week 5

Hi my name is Ben Wagner and I've been working in the Linksvayer Lab at Penn. We work on evolutionary biology and collective decision making in ants.

At the middle of week 5 I am still working on the microsatellites project, still with hope that I'll be able to get onto an animal behavior in the coming weeks. To remind you what my current project is... I have been taking 15 ants from a large number of colonies, and individually crushing, adding buffers, centrifuging, letting incubate, and finally perform PCR on these samples. There are also steps of Nano Dropping, where I use a Nano Drop machine to test light refraction at certain wave lengths, telling me how much DNA in is the sample, and running gel electrophoresis after PCR, in order to see the size of my samples. We are looking for microsatellites, also known as Short Tandem Repeats (STRs), in order to tell the difference between the genetic codes of the different colonies. Due to the caste systems Pharaoh (and other) ants use, the genetic code of a single colony is very identical, and two sister worker ants are more related than any human is to another human on average, except for identical twins. We are not trying to sequence the entire genome because that takes a long time and is very expensive. Instead we are looking fro Micro Satellites, which we expect could be different between colonies. As an example,we might be looking for a code that says to make a little extra of a certain protein in one colony when compared to another, as opposed to the code that says grow legs, or something all ants do.

Unfortunately I am currently in an awkward spot in time, as we have run out of the Taq MasterMix Polymerase needed to run PCR, as well as multiple of the markers needed to do multiplexing, which is marking the genetic sequence. So for the next few days I am starting up on new colonies, and preparing them for PCR. This means the project is likely to continue even longer, since we had not originally planned on doing more colonies (past the amount from my last post), and because we need to wait for delivery.

Hopefully things will become more exciting here in the near future, but for now its back to crushing ants!