Rutgers Ware Lab - Week 3

Hi everyone, this is Michael and I've been working in Ware Lab at Rutgers. We focus on studying the body and shape of dragonflies and damselflies.

This week started off me completing everything needed to be done for sequencing. The samples were submitted on Tuesday, and I got the sequence files (files used for analyzing dna on computer) back on Wednesday. While I was waiting, I scanned more wings for Will, and aligned more dna files.

On Wednesday, my professor guided me what to do with the raw sequence files, which involves playing with a handful of programs such as sequencher, clustal, mesquite, etc. Afterwards, I transformed those files into nexus files, ready to be analyzed and compared with gene database. At the end, I combined the genes coding for the same type of dna (such as 16s, 28s), and used the programs garli and figtree to produce a phylogenetic tree.

This is how the final image of a
wing scan looks like; the letters at the
bottom are the code for this sample.

On Thursday, a friend of my professor had an emergency at her lab in NJIT, and they picked me to assist her. She received more bee samples than she had expected, and she had to organize them into an excel file before Saturday. This involvd putting the code and information of each sample into rolls in excel.

The process of scanning wings. The pair of
wings are placed at the top left corner of a printer