Welcome to My World

Hello everyone,

     Since it’s coming close to the endof my experiment pledge, I thought I would share a little bit about the rest ofthe projects I am working on. My favorite part of my job is I get to work onmany projects at the same time. I am currently part of four projects: Analyzingrice soil microbiome in relation to different natural and man-made stressors, differentialexpression of hormones in relation to female gametophyte cell patterning, earlyvs late flowering time due to epigenetic memory, and a CRISPR experiment involvinggene editing to determine the maternal to zygotic transition in rice. If anyoneis curious about any of these experiments, please email me and I will be gladto explain more about them.

    Even if I don’t succeed in securingfunding, I’m really happy that I joined this experiment site. I hope I was ableto show some of you something new, and more importantly I hope that I was ableto explain it in way that made it easier to understand. If anyone has any questionsabout anything, feel free to email me. Thanks again to all the people who havedonated, and I would also like to thank the people who took the time to readthese silly Lab Notes.

    Oh yeah, I almost forgot. I receivedthe tumor-causing bacteria yesterday! I am currently culturing it up to make astock that I can save for later use. I also sowed the Arabidopsis seedsyesterday that I plan infect with the tumor-causing bacteria. They have to growfor about month before I can use them. Now I just have to wait and see if thisfunding drive pans out in my favor. Then I will be able to purchase the necessaryCRISPR elements and other ridiculously expensive, but necessary, enzymes andthings of that sort. I’ll post some pictures of the lab soon so you all can seewhere I do my craft.

    One last thing, a PhD student’sproject from my lab was featured in a New York Times article. It is about the plantmicrobiome. Here’s the link if you’re interested.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/science/going-inside-the-rice-microbiome.html?emc=eta1&_r=0 

Have a good day everyone!

Thomas Irvine