Tag: DNA

Marine DNA Empowers Cancer Research

(Cross-posted from Ocean Genome Legacy news) Can you imagine that a shark or an eel might help your doctor to treat cancer? Ocean Genome Legacy is collaborating with the Austrian Academy of Sciences to study marine genomes in the search for new cancer therapies. Cancer cells are harmful because their genetic programming contains errors, causing genes to turn on or off abnormally. By comparing how … Continue reading Marine DNA Empowers Cancer Research

Ocean Genome LegacyApril 27, 2016April 26, 2016Leave a comment

In the Lab, Outreach, Research

What’s Inside a DNA Bank? A Tour of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center

By Charlotte Seid, Biorepository Manager at OGL You may have visited a museum or an aquarium, but how about a DNA repository? The MSC’s Ocean Genome Legacy Center is home to over 23,000 DNA samples from many of the ocean’s strangest, rarest, and most threatened creatures. Why do we collect DNA? The genetic material of life holds valuable information about each species’ unique adaptations, its … Continue reading What’s Inside a DNA Bank? A Tour of the Ocean Genome Legacy Center

mscbloggerJuly 7, 2015July 7, 20151 Comment

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Photos

Grab sampler (front) and corer ready for use!

A terrific drawing of what I assume is my student, me and the fetal pig we dissected in lab.

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

You can’t understand how good this looks until you’ve spent nearly 2 months living in a field station. They gave us homemade blackberry juice for goodness sake.

Reef buddies

Fair-well my old Dell!

Kylla and Brendan working on the shed – almost done!

This should probably be marine themed, but… well, feel free to imagine it is a spiny fish…

Lugging these around is my exercise for the day

Commemorative stamps released in 2006 representing various pursuits of Ben Franklin (Image credit: http://faq.usps.com/eCustomer/iq/images/AI7546-6.jpg)

Chris and Mariah dazzle students with fun facts about lobsters, crabs and snails!

“What! We have to fit all our stuff into that little thing!”

A polychaete worm we found in the mud – check out those parapodia!

One of Maria’s many beautiful illustrations: search her name to see more!

Maybe this Blue Planet moment will give you some idea. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

Fish printing on t-shirts is a great way to show off your artistic talents!

Top: Hollis Jones inspects a coral skeleton. That muddy rock has been around for longer than human civilization. Bottom: Bill talks about the history of Bocas reefs and explains how we can use coral fossils to tell us about the natural world of the past. (photo credit: Janine Ledet)

In this nutrient-poor bog, these carnivorous pitcher plants subsist by trapping insects in their “pitcher” filled with sweet nectar

A little marble can make a big difference….

Lauren Josephs squirts fluorescein dye into the water column. By measuring the dye dispersal over a time-lapse video you can get an idea of water turbulence around coral reefs.

My lost and found glasses! Now part of the marine debris sculpture!

Tubes of sperm, eggs, and embryos!

The new Hughes greenhouse, to be completed this spring, just in time for collecting marsh plants!

Forbes sea star and common periwinkle just chillin’ in the tank

Old-timey maps add gravitas to any explanation.

Frozen tide pool

Right: Sand covering a head of Siderastrea siderea. Each point is a different grain of sand. (credit: Janine Ledet & Kali Horn) Left: sediment infiltrating the polyps of a Montastrea cavernosa. The arrows show the movement of one grain of sand, proving that corals can direct the movement of foreign substances. (credit: Andrea Burton & Joelle Kilchenmann)

Ice Skating in the Boston Commons

The whelk Busycon spiratum – graphite

Catherine celebrating the big day (right) with her father and sister. Brendan (left) starting his defense presentation.

Volunteer Scientist with The Science Club for Girls

Thin layer of ice coating Fucus

Also this happened. That’s King Sebastian, our fearless boat driver and all around hero.

Traditional New England Clambake

The Vollmer Lab at STRI! I promise that water bottle will be out by the time experiments begin but it’s important to stay hydrated while moving heavy boxes and dodging cockroaches the size of small rodents.

Massachusetts Sea Level Curve from USGS. Click image to go to source.

The essentials of Fucus reproduction

Sea surface temperature data collected by NOAA satellites. Notice the dark orange band indicating the warm Gulf Stream. (Image from www.science.nasa.gov)

Ode to a microscopic world. (photo credit: Joelle Kilchenmann, Hollis Jones & Janine Ledet)

Don’t mind us, just destroying some echinoderm innocence.

View of the Bay of Fundy from a beautiful coastal trail in Quoddy Head State Park

First light hits U.S. land each morning here at Quoddy Head Light

Pottery shards are likely from an ancient sieve, used in the step to strain the solid curds from the liquid whey.

Waves trickling through polished pebbles before Egg Rock. Nahant, MA, 2012.

Ecological relationships between marsh cordgrass, mussels, and fiddler crabs. Published in Hughes et al. 2013.

Filtering water in the back of the MSC van!

Moose looks on as I filter water samples in the backseat of the MSC van.

Rasit (my husband) armed and ready to put up his poster on phylogeography of inverts in the Mediterranean and Black Sea.

Ulva intestinalis in a frozen pool

Our dear Kylla presenting her fancy statistical modeling of intertidal algal ecosystem biodiversity.

Ice layer in the high intertidal

Snowy sunset at the MSC

A clear, penetrable membrane seals the body cavity of the lobster, but still allows blood to be taken as needed.

Me at work in the Florida mangroves.

North Atlantic sea cucumber with feeding tree extended!

Barnacles entombed in ice

Top left: whitetip reef shark (Triaenodon obesus) Top right: crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) Bottom left: Moorish idol (Zanclus cornutus) Bottom right: goliath grouper (Epinephelus quinquefasciatus)

Left to right: Scuba smurf inspects survey gear, Christine Newton sets up a transect line for survey

(Silbiger & Munguia 2008)

Catherine celebrates the big day with her father and sister.

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

Good morning sun!

Holy Man, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor. Unfortunately, this isn’t likely to be an efficient way to grow A. cervicornis… they need more room – but I will be interested to see how this looks in 1-2 years.

Liz Hemond and Prof. Vollmer at the Marine Science Center

Boo!!

The same beach, Canoe Beach, during Hurricane Sandy. The waves are near 10 feet high in this photo

Exploring the expansive intertidal for Marine Ecology class surveys

Front view of RoboLobster

A map of Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Dots represent right whale sightings, solid lines indicate previous shipping lanes, dotted lines indicate new shipping lanes. stellwagen.noaa.gov

We barely had a boat ride where we didn’t see one or both of these. It was seriously magical. (photo credit: Sam Csik)

My new shiny Dell! Did I mention it was touch screen! Hello 21st century!

Thanks to research in China, the proteins that make these jellies light up can now make your ice cream glow!

1856 portrait of Mr. Verne. All sea captains should have such a beard http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jules_Verne.gif

This sign is no joke, those seals are huge! And they can move faster than you think…

Huge anenome at Pigeon Point!

Our shiny new lab space at the Northeastern MSC! So many shelves and drawers and windows!

Blue clab – colored pencil

Rate of Education Improvement in 49 Countries from 1995 to 2009

Tony’s Market: your local source of Pringles and cookies

Winning marathon times for the Boston Marathon 1933-2004. Open diamonds represent men’s times, closed circles represent women’s times. (Figure 2 from Miller-Rushing et al. 2013)

In case you were wondering, this is Comet Pan-Starrs. Thanks to Boston light pollution, it was not visible to the naked eye in Framingham. http://www.space.com/20056-comet-panstarrs-march-night-sky.html

This isn’t even base camp… what the $#&% are we getting ourselves into…

Returning from a night snorkel tracking octopuses in Bonaire.

Photo: news.cnet.com

Small (left) gel rigs hold about 1/3 the number of samples of a large (right) gel rig.

Students reference their self-made field guides to ID species during a rocky shore survey on Georges Island

Professor Bracken and our guide, Deb, deploy the CTD at our open ocean sampling site

A comparison of heatmaps made using some common color schemes: red, black and green (top left), default heatmap colors in R yellow to red (middle left) and red & blue (bottom left), along with their corresponding simulation for red/green deficit on the right.

Basic diagram of the neurosecretory system of the American lobster, Homarus americanus. Edited from Skiebe 2001.

The light grey mud is presumpscot – glacial till!

Male releasing spermatangia (left pictures) and female releasing oogonia (right pictures). Note the female receptacle (top right) has ruptured and conceptacles inside the recepatacle are visible.

La Jardinera del la Esperanza, Punta Nizuc, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Kylla and Me and the Wicked Half Marathon finish last year.

A real live nautilus! In the aquarium at California Academy of Sciences

Jonah crabs and club tunicates

Rachel Carson with Bob Hines conducting marine biology research in Florida in 1952. (Photo: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The Sea Education Campus (SEA) in Woods Hole, MA, where the retreat was located. Photo: patricialapadula.com

Map of the 11 sites surveyed in the Gulf of Maine

No words.

Runners stopping for water during the 2012 Boston Marathon. Photo: hunffingtonpost.com

Worms!!

Just some of the contents of our lab’s outdoor storage shed… the “scientific equipment” we marine ecologists use.

Wiring success! Maybe I will start moonlighting as an electrician.

Geoffrey Mutai finishing the 2011 Boston Marathon. His time of 2 hours 3 minutes and 2 seconds set a new record of the fastest marathon ever. (Photo: http://www.npr.org)

VW bug, Mexico. Photo: Jason deCaires Taylor.

Professor Matt Bracken helps students identify some inverts living in the mud

Pit Organs have thousands of nerve endings that can sense temperature changes of less than a thousandth of a degree.

Steps to perfect blancmenge: 1) dry harvested irish moss and while waiting 2) teach an old dog new tricks and 3) take sexy seaweed shots. 4) Gather supplies. 5) Warm milk with chosen ingredients and irish moss. Once the ‘gel’ has been released from the seaweed 5) strain and put into individual serving cups. Let set overnight in the refrigerator and enjoy!

It goes on and on and on and on.

Putting your face near poisonous animals is a staple of the 3 Seas immersive experience.

Me and Pinar at the Ankara Half Marathon.

Franklin’s 1770 map of the Gulf Stream (Image courtesy of NOAA Photo Library)

left to right: White Band disease experiment, falcon tubes with coral fragments, the omniscient autoclave

NC Analyzer

I was moved to tears. (left photo credit: Sam Csik)

The proportion of megabytes for “Graduate School” and for “Everything Else”

Of course, we had to take a pit stop on our drive for some tidepooling!

Canoe Beach on a “normal” calm day

I was lucky to glimpse this snail after a wave exposed it, before it quickly burrowed back into the sand.

Castle Rock on a calm day at East Point.

Welcome to the bat cave. Spooky.

Asco-fix-em! Quick thinking and improvising are key for successful field work: if your tool breaks, patch it together with some seaweed!

Tiniest spoon EVER!

Morning in Bocas

Left to right / top to bottom: Make shift field lab in Darling Center Cabin, make shift field lab in the field (!), Maine-ly Meat Restaurant, Acadia NP, Alewife fish ladder in Damariscotta, ME, grass roll, and sunset.

Littorine snails congregate on the scarce rocky refuges of the primarily sandy beaches of Costa Rica.

Helpers colored a marine animal or plant to add to our food web, and then we connected them with string to demonstrate links in the food chain.

… and allegedly some ghosts.

An owl helps with oceanographic research! Photo by John Lund, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute

Even the fetal pig thinks I am a good TA! Thats all the gratification I need….

Waves like this make diving a bit dangerous

Weighing a sample on the microbalance

VW bug habitat plan. Jason deCaires Taylor.

Green sea turtle – not actually an illustration, this is a sand sculpture I made on a beach (one of my more bizarre artistic hobbies)

Kylla lends her algae expertise to some COSA students

Heterosiphonia japonica – the alga we were hoping to survey today

Sand dollar and sea urchin test – pen and ink

Geoff explaining our awesome new seawater system amidst the construction of the new and improved pumphouse.

Here’s part of a lobster nervous system pinned out in a Petri dish.

Rainbow of colors seen in full spectrum (left) and with two types of red/green deficit: protanopia (middle) and deuteranopia (right). Images from wikipedia.

I thought students might be squeamish about the fish – but they loved it!

Sometimes you meet unexpected friends in the intertidal

Hiking in the New Hampshire White Mountains

Reef research underway

Left to right: Week long progression of beautiful weather on day 1 to pouring rain on day 4. Sites: Cranberry Rd, Gouldsboro, ME; Bracy Cove, ME; Marshall Point, ME; and Newagen Seaside Inn, ME