The Three Month Freeze!

 

These guys have put up with a lot over the past 90 days. Little do they know that they will soon be wrapped in foil and thrown in a steaming vat of liquid nitrogen...

At 30 days and 60 days after the experiment began I gathered up one nubbin from each colony of each species and froze it for later analysis. Here I show you the process, with my 90 day samples. 

With the 90 samples, the control samples were also frozen. Along with a bunch of extras that have also been in contact with algae for 90 days. This will ensure that I have enough tissue to work with in order to do all of the analyses I want to do. Only the Porites lobata (lobe coral) samples will be submitted for gene expression RNA sequencing, but they will all be subjected to total lipid analysis, zooxanthellae density counts, and more specific gene expression analysis using real time PCR for comparisons between species using the information gathered from the Porites lobata sequences.