Plant Nerd

At the beginning of the week, Carrie showed me how to set up a 96-well tray for PCR with single EST markers. I found that it's really hectic when I'm making multiple cocktails, each with a different primer, and then realize that I'm running low on Taq, primers, dNTPs, or buffer...all at once. Anyway, I actually finished the PCRs with all of the primers that I'll be using in my project, but I still have the microsatellites to do. With the PCR results, I ran gels and found that most of them all had bands, which made me really happy! Once, when I was microwaving the agarose + buffer solution, I got caught up in talking to someone and forgot about the beaker! So the solution spilled over... but thankfully, it wasn't anything serious. I remembered that safety video and told one of the lab people what happened (even though I was completely mortified), but she was really nice and told me how to clean it up =]. After checking for the germination of the remaining seeds, David and I collected seeds from plants that had fruited and selfed those that hadn't been crossed yet. During that time, I had a chance to ask David about his "life path", and I found out that he had a fascinating story to tell. Then up in the lab, I went to Google Maps and found the locations of all of the tilingii and guttatus populations that I'm studying, and I made my own map for my poster. Oh, speaking of posters - today, we dug out old posters that various people from the lab had made, and David showed me how there is a variety of ways to set them up. Along with that, I heard/read about the fascinating research of past and present lab members. It's been a busy but fun-filled week...

I've been thinking - I've always considered myself an animal-person (my house = perpetually overcrowded zoo / animal hospital), and I am...but this summer, I realized how incredibly amazing/intruiging/unbelievably complex plants are! Since I was young, my parents bought flat after flat of plants from Lowe's and also rescued unwanted ones from various people moving back to Japan, and I had always wondered what it was about plants that fascinated my parents. I viewed plants as boring because no matter how hard I worked, they never seemed to interact with me - they don't play fetch, hop onto my lap, beg for carrots, or curl up in my hair. But I realized this summer that plants aren't just those green, crunchy, photosynthesizing "things" that we eat in salads - they are incredibly diverse and have so many different mechanisms for survival that have evolved throughout their history. I'm kind of disappointed about not realizing this earlier...It's kind of like when you're in the same class with a person for a whole year, but you never really get to know her until the last day when you realize how charismatic she truly is...and then you want to hit yourself for not taking the opportunity to get to know her better when you had had the chance to for the whole year. But I'm happy because I have the rest of my hopefully long life to get to know plants better.
I can't believe it's already been two weeks! I've now begun stopping to examine random plants while I'm running and looking at the distance between the anther and stamen (I'm really interested in that trait!), and I'm now performing experiments with the various begonias, Saint Paulias, and Torenias around my house to see if I can cross-polinate and/or self them. I feel like such a plant nerd...and I love it!