research

The first couple days here in Germany haven’t been too exciting. I’m just trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing here at the institute, get enough food to live, and get enough sleep to get over my jet lag.

                At the institute I’m working with two advisors Rakesh and Arne and they have me working on five projects, it’s kind of insane. Let me see if I can remember them well enough to list them out. Everybody at the institute studies Nicotiana attenuata, a tobacco plant that is native to Beaver Dam Wash in South Western Utah. BYU owns a research ranch there that they use (that’s how I got this internship). This year that research plot got overrun by grasshoppers so their field season is kind of shot this year. I was actually down there a couple weeks ago (my lab at BYU takes samples down there) and I met some of the people from the institute and they said the day after I left the grasshoppers came and ruined everything. Anyways, here’s my list of projects in no particular order (Tenery wanted to know):

1.       I’m working with a wild type (that means normal) plant and two GMO strains to see how those GMO plants affect the size and growth rate of the plant. After we’re done with this experiment we’re going to collect the leaves and roots and extract the RNA to see transcription differences.

2.       Arne thinks that the GMO strains may confer salt tolerance so I will be growing the wild-type and GMO seeds in agar with across varying levels of salt concentration to look for differences.

3.       Rakesh is looking at bacteria that may confer resistance to a certain type of fungal infection in the plants. For this project we are inoculating the seeds with one strain of bacteria (treatment 1) and comparing it to seeds inoculated with a mixture of five bacteria including the one strain from the other treatment (treatment 2). We are plating these on phytagel plates (makes it easier to harvest the roots) and adding fungi to the petri dish then on days 15, 17, 19 etc. we will take samples and extract bacterial DNA from the roots to see the different concentrations of the bacteria. To get enough roots for the DNA extraction we had to plant 10 plates with 60 plants each for every harvest day (6 days), we plated 70 to have a little extra. That’s 4,200 seeds! We did that on Thursday, it was a long day. 

4.       I can’t remember. We have 70 more plates to plant, yay.

5.       I can’t remember, good thing Rakesh works with me every day, right?

Every day for lunch we walk over to the Carl Zeiss factory, they have a cafeteria (Mensa) that’s cheap and pretty good, it is cafeteria food after all but it’s better than anything I make in my apartment. I can usually get a meal there for about 3 euro. People take long lunches here, like an hour and a half. I have been working

After work I’ve gone to the grocery story every day. It’s hard to get a lot of stuff when you have to carry it a kilometer home. The first day I got some food essentials: bread, brats, and ketchup. Tuesday some paper goods and general cleaning stuff paper towels etc. and Wednesday some sauerkraut to go with my brats, among other things.

After that there’s not much to do in my apartment so I just prepare some brats and go to sleep. I’m still trying to get over my jet lag and my cold so I’m sure I’ll have energy to do more things once I get over those two things. Also, my apartment doesn’t have internet (you have to have a residence permit aka live in the country longer than 3 months to get an internet connection) and we live on the edge of the forest so cell service is pretty low. It’s been kinda rough trying to skype people. In order to get internet I have to walk a kilo to the institute and I’m not too keen on doing that at 10 PM at night, the time that Tenery gets off work.