After a week of presentations in Germany, my professor and some lab members assigned me to run PCRs for about 50 samples. Since I had to pipette chemicals into vials for PCR one by one prior to running the PCR, the process took almost the whole day. After PCR was done, however, I used a pipette with 8 slots for gel electrophoresis, which probably saved me about an hour of work.
On Wednesday, Dominic, the third member of the lab, returned from Guiana with a lot of samples. One of them is a complete massive beetle he found in his house (see image below). Along with them were bees, ants, all sorts of interesting insects.
On thursday, Will introduced me to his project: he is designing a program that can identify Odonata species just by matching images of wings from those in a large database. I decided to take part in his project. The work basically involves scanning wings in a way much like how you scan papers, except they fly away extremely easily, so I had to perform every action gently to avoid messing up the scanning process.
On Wednesday, Dominic, the third member of the lab, returned from Guiana with a lot of samples. One of them is a complete massive beetle he found in his house (see image below). Along with them were bees, ants, all sorts of interesting insects.
On thursday, Will introduced me to his project: he is designing a program that can identify Odonata species just by matching images of wings from those in a large database. I decided to take part in his project. The work basically involves scanning wings in a way much like how you scan papers, except they fly away extremely easily, so I had to perform every action gently to avoid messing up the scanning process.
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| Dominic's beetle This is about the size of my palm. Dominic even says that "it's like a toy", since you can move its wings and claws freely. |
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| Pipette with eight slots: without this, those samples would take hours of work jsut to run a gel electrophoresis. |
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