Lab 14: posters and abstracts

Adriana Robledo

4-26-19

purpose:

The purpose of this lab was to finish revising your abstract, add our metadata to a , to fix any mistakes that were made when creating your poster, and vote on a label for our cilicure lab.

procedure:

1. Vote on cilicure logo
2. Enter metadata into the online collaborative file
3. Label you DNA sample tube with your last initial (of the group) in alphabetical order, section number, a underscore, then “2Sp19”
4. Obtain the concentration from the tube and replace it on the rack
5. Head over to the computer lab and use the time to work on the group’s abstract.

Title:

Soil eDNA analysis targeting the V4 region using 18S primer.

Abstract:

Soil ciliates are a diverse group of eukaryotes that play an important role in the environment but are understudied due to a lack of standard methods used to extract them from soil.The purpose of this experiment was to determine ciliate biodiversity in soil samples taken from the rhizosphere of Baylor trees. The protocols used were ones that have yet to be perfected in hopes of establishing them as universal method such as silica bead extraction of DNA and the chelex extraction method.DNA was extracted and purified from the soil collected using the ‘silica bead method’. The DNA concentration was obtained using a nanodrop and gel electrophoresis by running against a mass standard, and used PCR to amplify the 18s V4 region.The Polymerase Chain Reaction yielded a negative result, indicated by a ‘smear’ of DNA rather than a band. The nanodrop showed the concentration of DNA to be 262.1 ng/µl with the  A260/280 to be 1.5. Despite negative results, the experiment showed the validity of results that can be found through silica bead and chelex DNA extraction; however, the lack of positive results was most likely due to an improper dilution or a degradation of DNA. Additionally, further research can be done using bioinformatics to visualize the ciliate diversity.

Conclusion:

This lab was extremely helpful in the way that it helped us to finish two big pieces of our final presentation in one lab. We all came together and brought little parts of the abstract that we independently worked on and asked for help perfecting the message and wording. We split up the work among the group and were able to successfully complete everything that we needed to do.

future steps:

In the future, we will present our presentations to the class and then at the symposium.

storage:

Return the tubes to the rack and any other miscellaneous supplies.