Thursday, January 31, 2013


Week #2:
Image 1: Amphioxus Gastrula

During the course of my first two weeks of developmental bio lab, I was trusted to be alone and to fiddle around with a Leica DMLB research scope. Needless to say, I was very cautious about not breaking anything. However, despite my wariness, I managed to take a few pictures using a PixelLink camera in conjunction with the Leica scope. Listed here are three of the many slides I examined over the week.

Within a day or two, I hope to digital enhance my images from lab and add a scale or two to add to my growing knowledge of scientific image processing.
Image 2: 4 hr Chick embryo, yellow filter

Image 3: Starfish, 10x, red filter

Friday, January 18, 2013


Week #1:
The end of this week marks the beginning of a new semester and with a new semester starts new classes. One class in particular to which I will focus throughout this blog is Developmental Biology. This is my first “upper level class” so I am both excited and nervous. However, I assure my interests in the material and a willingness to learn will keep me motivated to do well. Also, I just need to get used to this called an essay. Apparently, biologists have to demonstrate their knowledge by writing… My aim for this class (and any class for that matter) is to learn as much as I can. I want to do more than scratch the surface of Biology (which is what I have done so far in my intro Bio classes) so hopefully an upper-level class can live up to my expectations and I can make sense of it all!
So besides having class and spending time trying to decipher a $100,000 microscope without breaking it, my week was still an eventful one. I had the pleasure of attending a seminar by Randy Daughters’ a UMM Biology candidate. His presentation related to cell potency of skeletal muscle stem cells, developmental plasticity and much more. His research was quite interesting. I looked up more about it that night. I mean, it is really humbling to know how much you actually don’t know! I didn’t know that “the induction of Noggin in dorsolateral explants from HGEM-Noggin transgenic neurulae will block formation of satellite cells (Daughters & Slack).” It makes me wonder what are the limits to what can be done and what still can be discovered!  

http://experts.umn.edu/pubDetail.asp?t=pm&id=79951534491&n=Randy+S+Daughters&u_id=578