Fun Stuff to Check Out

If you're getting a headache from all of this science talk then check out some of the fun sites I like to visit to 'take the edge off'.

Sometimes being in school feels like an Escher never-ending staircase.  It's always up, up, up or down, down, down, and who knows which way is which.  Here is a fabulous animation that describes the feeling perfectly.

Like many Pastafarians, I also belong to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  It's a huge movement and gaining more and more momentum everyday...

My friend Daniella recently told me about Best-Of-Craig's-List.  It's a little saucy, so MINORS BE WARNED...  There's a lot of funny rants and raves to be had there. 

Listen to music online at Pandora. Choose a a song or musician you like and they create a playstation of similar songs/artists to play for you!

I enjoy making metal jewelry (forging, chasing, enameling) but as a student I haven't had much time for it. For the meantime, I've substituted with surfing the net for cool jewelry (like this and like that) like that, and like that). Maybe when I have more time, I will sign up for classes or lab time at Danaca Design; a very cool jewelry studio close to Ravenna Park.

Et viola!  Here is my senior thesis!

http://staff.washington.edu/ajbailey/Thesis_Final.doc

Our 12 day cruise to Glacier Bay was a huge success and now all of us are holed up in our laboratories sifting through our data, looking for golden nuggets that we can write a senior thesis on. 

If you're interested in sea sickness, read the blog I wrote on it.  It was inspired from our cruise :P

Hi! I'm April and I am one of the lucky students traveling to Glacier Bay, Alaska this spring. Each of us has designed our own research project that we will carry out aboard the R/V Thomas G Thompson during our 12 day voyage.

My project is about a genus of phytoplankton: Pseudo-nitzschia. Pseudo-nitzschia are diatoms, a type of microscopic single-celled marine algae which are found in all of the world's oceans.

Here in the Northwest, these tiny little guys are causing quite a stir. Of the 30 described species in this genus, 11 are known to produce the neurotoxin domoic acid. Domoic acid is harmful and sometimes fatal to birds, sea mammals, and humans when they consume domoic acid contaminated seafood.

Little is known about the coastal distributions of Pseudo-nitzschia. This expedition will be one of the first looking at Pseudo-nitzschia species in Glacier Bay!

A couple of studies have linked salinity as a controlling factor in the growth and geographic distributions of Pseudo-nitzschia.

In my research, I will measure the geographic distribution of certain species of Pseudo-nitzschia along a salinity gradient in Glacier Bay. I will also look at the distributions in Puget Sound, Washington.

Kate Hubbard, a graduate student at the University of Washington, is my mentor for this project and has been a tremendous help. It is her research that was the inspiration for this project. Kate has developed primers that are specific to the internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) region of almost a dozen Pseudo-nitzschia species.

All Pseudo-nitzschia have an ITS1 region in their genome, but each species exhibits a unique sequence length and base-pair composition (although some species have the same sequence length). By using fluorescent primers that anneal to this region, the ITS1 region is easily amplified in a PCR reaction. These fluorescent primers are later used to in an automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (ARISA) to measure the ITS1 sequence length. Once sequence lengths are determined then it can be correlated to species.

This method offers an accurate way to quickly determine the presence of many Pseudo-nitzschia species.

Check out the Armbrust lab! It is a biological oceanography lab at UW. Adrian Marchetti, a post-doc, has taken me under his wing and is tutoring me in the ways of Pseudo-nitzschia. Currently we are looking into how iron limitation affects cell growth and cellular expression of the ferritin gene of the oceanic species Pseudo-nitzschia granii.