This week, I continued to learn about the many processes that go into the research for my project. Since my project is interdisciplinary, there seems to be never-ending background knowledge needed to understand how we are analyzing our samples for this project.
A victory did come in at the beginning of the week when I performed my first DNA extraction of river water! It was very hard to get used to simple parts of the process such as pipetting that seemed so much easier when I was watching our lab assistant Hannah do the extraction a couple of weeks ago. I did not realize how hard it would be to get used to just moving my hands around in order to avoid contamination. It felt like I was having to juggle multiple things, but as I got practice I started to get the hang of it! The extraction was a three hour process, so I got plenty of practice.
My mentor Jen had me write out the processes that are going to be used to sample and analyze our data. I am going down the list of everything that we are sampling for and writing out a methodology on how we collect it and what processes are done to get the result that we are looking for. This really helped to solidify the knowledge that I already had or to fill in the gaps that didn’t click before. I learned how some machines work to test water quality such as trace metals, anions, and alkalinity. On the hydrology spectrum, I met the mineralogist Tyler and learned how the process works to find the different minerals that are present in the sediment. The process uses x-ray diffraction which was really interesting to learn about! This week a lot of things are starting to click and I feel like I have a much better understanding of the different tests that will be performed!
