The joys and woes of working with Zebrafish

Hello everyone! This week’s assignment is to discuss the joys and woes of scientific research and how our projects are coming along. In the beginning it was rather difficult to get the Whole-mount in situ protocol working, forcing us to synthesize new probes. The largest project I was assigned for the summer was to produce a panel of whole-mount in situ (WISH) images for the nine regeneration mutants and their respective wild type siblings. For a while it looked as if this would not be possible, but at this very moment I have results for 7/9 mutants and should be able to produce images for the final two mutants this week, meaning I will have the panel of images for my poster presentation. Since I have finally ‘mastered’ the WISH protocol, I will continue on with this project throughout August and into the fall semester learning new protocols, such as sectioning fin tissue samples and staining those as well to see gene expression. Moreover, I will need to test more markers than simply Lef1, which is what I have been using throughout the past two months. Overall, I am a fan of research; however, when thinking about all the work that needs to get done it is rather daunting.