Hey everyone! My name is Susannah Butters and I'm a rising junior at Carolina Friends School, a small Quaker school in Durham. This summer I will be working in Dr. Richard Di Giulio's lab in the Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth Sciences.
It has been a whirlwind first week. On Monday, the first day, instead of being picked up by the usual one escort to take me to the lab I'd be working in, four people arrived. They were all quite enthusiastic and got me excited about spending the summer working with them. Once I arrived at the lab, I was given a tour and an introduction to what they do and what I'd be studying for the next seven weeks. They research how polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) affect the aryl hydrocarbon receptor (AHR) pathway in zebrafish and killifish.
By the second day, they had me working with a graduate student studying zebrafish hatchlings. These hatchlings had been dosed with PAHs and we looked at them under a microscope, noting the impact of the PAHs. We were especially focused on the zebrafishes' development of pericardial edemas from their exposure to PAHs.
Another day I got to help spawn killifish. To do this, you hold the females and rub their stomachs with your thumb to make their eggs come out onto your gloved hand. You add the eggs to a jar and then fertilize them with a male fish. The first time that I got to help with this though, we came across a surprise. The person I was working with, Cole, was spawning a female fish and got two already fertilized eggs among many regular ones. Everyone in the lab assured me that this never happens. Eggs are supposed to be fertilized only after they leave the mother. They looked at these two eggs under a microscope and figured that it had been about a week since they were fertilized. It's a mystery to everyone in the lab as to how this happened and I'm interested to see what we discover about them as tests are run as they get older. For now, they are living in the lab and have been nicknamed Jesus Fish 1 and Jesus Fish 2.
I'm very excited to be working in this lab. It's already proven to be a very interesting week.
2 comments:
You're lab group sounds really cohesive and fun. Looks like you'll be doing a lot of different and interesting things this summer. Great!
Hey!! I'm in a different Howard Hughes program (the one for rising sophomores) but I'm studying something very similar. Our lab is studying how PCB can induce abnormal heart development through the Ahr pathway. We're using zebrafish and chick cells. Good luck!!!
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