Latest Posts

  • And we are rolling!

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    As Rachel announced in a previous note, we are collaborating with Jeff Bowman from SIO in the deployment, collection, and analysis of samples, as well as in the educational experience. The gist of the NSF grant is to develop a CURE (course based undergraduate research experience) to involve students in research early on (we are…

  • We were awarded an NSF grant!

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    We found out today that we received a $249,978 NSF grant for the submission: Using Ocean Plastic Research to Increase Student Engagement and Persistence in Biology. Needless to say, we are absolutely ecstatic. Here is the announcement: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1832545  and here is a nice blog posting by Jeff Bowman at Scripps Oceanography describing our pilot last…

  • Collaborations and expansion

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    Hi all! I’d like to share some exciting developments of the project! First off, we found a new collaborator, Dr. Jeff Bowman at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, to assist us in bioinformatics analyses! You can find his website here: http://www.polarmicrobes.org.  Secondly, we’re ready to pilot portions of this project in undergraduate classrooms! Starting this…

  • Day 40 and rolling!

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    Last Thursday Wendy and I went out to collect our day 40 samples! So far so good- we have collected at day 12, 24, and 40, with one more to go. Here we are, returning with the treasures. What we do is to place the small cages with the plastic in large ziplock bags filled with…

  • New Deployment!

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    We have been quiet but we have been busy. After the FTIR analysis (showing signs of degradation in the plastic) and PCR of the colonies grown from the plastic on ChromAgar Vibrio (showing interesting but not pathogenic Vibrios), we decided we needed a longer deployment with more analyses, including SEM and (maybe) RNA. It took…

  • Poster presentation accepted for ASM2017!

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     ASM Microbe conference!  Needless to say, we are very excited. Just received some preliminary FT-IR data (this is a chemical analysis technique that can expose changes in the structure of materials) for one of the plastics, LDPE (that would be the thin produce bag kind of plastic). We are for sure seeing some changes in peaks…

  • Extracting DNA

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    Few days ago we used the MOBIO Biostic kit to isolate DNA I extracted from microbial colonies grown on ChromAgar Vibrio with the goal of identifying them using PCR. Colonies had been collected and frozen at -20 oC. Super excited to see what comes up! =) 

  • Re-Analysis and Validation!

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    Thanks to your contributions, we were able to purchase the Geneious software package to validate our analyses. I’m still in the midst of pre-processing for our sequences–since we have millions of reads and low quality data can result in inaccurate species identification, it’s important to use only the highest quality data to identify species. So I’m busily combing…

  • Moving forward!

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    View of Dana Point Harbor, just North of our sampling site. The team has been quiet since the ISME conference, but that does not mean we have been idle…on the contrary! We have been teaching and dealing with a number of other things that popped up as fall started. However the afterglow of the ISME…

  • ISME impressions and poster link

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     ISME16 started yesterday afternoon with the keynote address and today it was in full swing. It is my first time and so far I have been impressed with the scheduling (there seems to be plenty of time to attend the presentations, and look at the posters, and talk to other people). I attended a number of interesting…