The little urchins are growing!

This week was a pretty interesting one. I'm knee-deep in my project, and the rest of the lab is working on obtaining DNA and other data from millions of baby sea urchins. On Monday I did a HUGE gel for 16 primersets and 12 individuals- that means I loaded 192 wells plus 8 ladders- all within 15 minutes. Beyond that time, the gel begins to get fuzzy and loaded DNA in one well might mix with another well. For this particular gel, I needed some high-tech equipment to fill the wells before the timer ran out. I got to use the collest pipette ever. It was just like a normal automatic pipette except that it had 8 tips instead of 1. This allowed me to load my gel much more quickly and efficiently. it's really fun to use, but hard also. Sometimes the pippette won't suck up or dispense the correct amount of liquid, which can be frustrating. So on Tuesday I got to go to the embryo sea urchin freezer where people were viewing the babies to see if they were developing on schedule. Unfortunately, some of the embryo cultures were infected with bacteria, which had to be eliminated without eliminating the babies. The first thought was to dump the sea water that the eggs were in since the eggs were on the bottom and the water was on top. But some of the eggs had already hatched and the babies were swimming around in the water. Then we used a filter to avoid the eggs and babies, but suction out the bacteria. When I got back to the lab, I looked at the big gel I had run the day before. Turns out one whole plate was ineffective, so I redid that on Wednesday. Thursday I did another gel, and Friday I got to work with the urchins again. By this stage, the urchins look like little floating, transparent pyramids that can swim. They're really cute, but sadly, they had to die for the sake of science... So I spent Friday morning centrifuging the eggs to the bottom of the tube, sucking out the sea water, and replacing it with buffer that instantly kills the larvae and preserves the DNA which is then used to understand more about the offspring. As the little babies grow, they will develop sac-like structures on their sides, from which will spring the future adult sea urchin. The interesting thing about sea urchins is that they are born twice- once from an egg, and then again from these sac-like structures. Why? Nobody knows...