Student Research at Duke

…But maybe Samantha Pearlman is about to identify a new species! After isolating DNA from her mail-order Madagascar tomato frogs and making the samples jump through various procedural hoops, Samantha has decent data on 12 of 36 frogs. (As for the rest, well, she’s got to go through it all over again…)

Nonetheless, things are getting pretty cool in the Yoder Lab: “When we compared the frogs to each other, we found an enormous amount of genetic variation– and after comparing the eastern frogs to the western frogs, we found that there was more variation WITHIN our single eastern species than there was between the previous paper’s TWO separate western species.”

Could it be that the putative single eastern species is not singular? Stay tuned!

Andrew Lyu wrote:

After almost 4 weeks in lab, I’ve found that I’ve moved away from the “What am I supposed to do today?” attitude towards more of a “What CAN I do today?” mood. It’s incredible how quickly you can get addicted to research. I find myself dreaming about protocols, coming in on the weekends (by my own free will ), staying until 7 or 8pm, and just getting completely wrapped up in what I’m doing. It’s truly been a great experience, and I definitely would like to continue researching throughout my undergraduate career.

And then the Brigid Hogan (corrected 7/16) Fan Wang lab got a paper accepted to Neuron and he saw that part of the operation too!

Sometimes, doing good science means making your own tools. Usually that’s when you’re planning to do something that nobody has thought of before. But in Sidney Kuo’s case, it was just that he couldn’t find an appropriate vacuum filtering setup.

“I had to empty and clean the only vacuum filtration flask we had, which contained probably the nastiest, worst smelling compounds in this entire lab, file a hole through a rubber stopper large enough for the funnel, which took at least an hour, and cut my own filter paper to fit the funnel.”