As the summer has progressed, so has my research. We got our first set of sequencing data back last week, and are hopefully going to get our next set back next week. The mutation rates have also been calculated, and there’s another set to be run in order to confirm the mutation rates for a couple strains. All in all, my summer project is close to being completed, we already have usable data that already narrowing our hypotheses down (but I’ll save what it is telling us for the poster session in two weeks).
In terms of the highs and the lows of research, I’ve learned that not everything will turn out like it should, and that even if you try not to make a mistake sometimes it happens anyways. In the sequencing data we got back, there was some noise, which was normal – you just delete the insignificant data and organize the data into a readable format. However, we tagged the different DNA with different barcoded primers, and primers were showing up that I did not put in to the PCR (maybe when I diluted some of the primers it could have contaminated the other wells if I was not careful enough). Thankfully, this was okay because I could match up the sequences that had a barcode that didn’t belong with sequences that did, which allowed the deletion of the out-of-place barcoded data. There was also a mutation that showed up in every sequence of one isolate of one yeast strain, which was probably a mutation in the original isolate, which was out of my control.
Overall, my research has gone pretty smoothly. It has, however, shown me that you can never be too careful, and you also need to be aware and be able to notice things that can help you troubleshoot the experiment.
