Further poo developments and my first go at grave digging

So, for the past couple of weeks I've been honing my molecular biology skills on some samples of waterfowl excrement. The aim was to extract the DNA from them, quantify it, and if there was enough, run it through a PCR reaction that would pull out any parasite sequences. This would tell us whether those birds had these particular parasites.

The first lot, a mixture of teal and mallard, had mixed results and I was worried it was down to my technique. Since 2014 would't have touched molecular stuff with a bargepole; this project was a rather spontaneous choice. But we finished running some new samples yesterday (from pink-footed geese) and they were more successful. Crucially, they were also quite consistent. So hopefully we can put the dodgy ducks down to being dodgy samples.

With the training montage more or less finished, yesterday afternoon I got to work with the samples for my project at last. We'd also been waiting for space in a special clean lab: the Russian grave soil has been sitting dry in sealed bags for years, but we didn't want to presume our colleagues would be okay with us spilling it over their workspace.

There were ten little paper envelopes, each with a small handful of soil. We picked one, poured it into a petri dish and filled up eleven DNA-extraction tubes, avoiding the big chunks of plant. One extra tube we saved for a particularly interesting lump. It was about two centimetres long, rod-shaped and a bit lumpy, and we have absolutely no idea what it was. My guess is an odd bit of root, but we excitedly labeled the tube as 'Finger' anyway. We want to eventually sequence all of the DNA anyway, so it will be interesting if we can match tube 12 to anything.

Finally, last week our little team increased from two to three. Me and Supervisor have been joined by Smith, an American student from the eponymous college with a background in parasitic worms of marine mammals. She's over here for a bit of summer fun helping out with worm research at the NHM. For the time being at least, she's helping me with labwork. Even if our methods are a bit different to what she's used to, she is very experienced and a dab hand with a pie-pette. A welcome addition.