Extractions complete + update!

Extractions are complete as of last week! It's been hectic as I had to cram in 80 extractions into one day and 30 into a second morning (had to re-extract some of the 96 samples). I had some issues with Porites compressa samples as their mucuses kept clogging the silica filters on the extraction columns I was using. I consistently had low yields for that species and had to concentrate the DNA using a sodium acetate-ethanol precipitation but the final concentration was perfect. There was some contamination in a few samples (see photo below) that I could not seem to resolve but I don't believe it will interfere with library preparation and sequencing. The general process is digestion of DNA with restriction enzymes -> clean-up and size selection -> amplification -> sequencing. Contamination is generally a concern during amplification/sequencing and clean-up/size selection generally removes contamination so I think there should be no issues.

Now for the update: because of your generous donations and the grant I received from the Society of Systematic Biologists, I was able to go with the University of Minnesota Genomics Center for both library preparation and sequencing! I would have liked to do the library preparation myself but with such limited time remaining (I graduate in May), it's best that I have it done by a genomics center to minimize potential error. The extracted DNA was sent to the University of Minnesota on Wednesday and was safely received on Thursday morning and is currently undergoing quality control before library preparation and subsequent sequencing. Here are some photos from the extraction process:

 

Look at all that prepped coral tissue!

 

Freshly lysed and being cleaned for elution

 

Plate of coral DNA ready to be shipped (notice the yellow coloration on some of the samples)

Thanks again, everyone!