Let the hunt begin!

I cannot believe that this is our last day in lab ! This year has gone by too fast… I remember the first day of lab last semester and thinking, “What did I get myself into?!” Now we are having our last day of lab and I feel like I’m not ready to leave. I am so sad that there is not another course like this available or a follow-up course. It will take quite some getting used to to participate in a normal lab (I will be taking Chem Lab II and Genetics Lab… yuck). I am going to miss talking about bacteriophages, genes, annotations, etc. etc. Now I am always going to compare writing lab reports and doing mundane procedures in other labs to working with Benedict and providing research for Tuberculosis in our SEA lab!

I am really going to miss working with Benedict, but especially working with all of you! It has been such a great year being part of the Bears in the Sea, and I am so proud of everything we have accomplished. I’m so thankful for the friendships we built, and I am sure I will be seeing each other either in classes or around campus next year as well. I hope that everyone will enjoy their summer (which is only a week away), and good luck on all of your exams!

Good luck in Virginia Anna! I am happy you will be representing us, and I know you will do a great job! And thank you to Dr. Adair and Dr. Gibbon for this wonderful experience! I hope we will stay in contact with each other!

I hope everyone enjoyed their Easter break! It was so relaxing, but unfortunately it is time to go back to work now .

I am already overwhelmed with everything these week, but seeing all of my friends again (and the fact that we only have two weeks left of school) are going to help me get through it. I wish everyone the best of luck with their finals and all of their presentations. I am looking forward to the functional annotation presentations on Thursday and the biome presentations on Friday. I annotated the end sequence of Benedict, which unfortunately did not have ANY interesting genes. All of my genes did not have significant BLAST results (if they did, the e-values were too high), there were no conserved domains, and therefore I could not determine the function of any genes. I am curious as to the interesting genes other groups found!

I am excited because I managed to finish my maize annotations. It went a lot easier than I expected due to help from Dr. Gibbon, Dr. Adair, Luke, and Bayless before Easter break. I really appreciate their patience in answering all of my questions! Only three more presentations in this class (functional annotation presentation, biome presentation, and honors presentation) and one more final… I am not excited about these coming two weeks, but we will soon be able to recuperate during the summer!

This is bittersweet… I am finished with my Benedict annotations and am now ready to begin annotating corn! I am going to miss working with Benedict, but I am looking forward to continuing to practice gene annotations with the corn genome. After going through the process today, I feel a little less stressed. I was quite worried at first, but I think that our experience with Benedict will help us greatly. I am so excited that we have been offered this opportunity for an Honors project instead of a ten-page paper. This way, we will be continuing to apply the research we have been doing for the last semester.

I was very happy to hear that instead of having a lab final, we will be having a lab party! I know it is before the biology final, but it will be nice to get together for the last time before we leave for summer. I can’t believe that after Easter, we will have only two more weeks left of school. We will have officially completed our Freshman year at Baylor!!! It is all going so fast… I feel like I just met all of you yesterday. We have been through a lot, but we have learned so much, built many friendships, and have hopefully contributed in some way to finding a cure for Tuberculosis!

It feels SO good to have this test over with. I remember looking at the syllabus in January and thinking, “April will be terrible!” It seemed so far away then, and now that day has come… and it feels so good to have that burden lifted off of my shoulders! Now I can start my life again (the one not involved in being antisocial, studying every minute I have, and reading a total of 23o pages in the bio textbook!).

Now I can focus on my functional gene annotations again. I think that I pretty much finished all of my genes yesterday, but I am going to go back and check. Many of my genes did not have any Blast results, which eliminated a lot of the process. I am very excited about the Honors project… developing our skills in gene annotations sounds much better than writing a ten page research paper! I am looking forward to working with the corn genome (a change from bacteriophages) and seeing the similarities and differences involved in the procedures. Hopefully it wont be too different than what we are doing now!

I hope that everyone will have a wonderful DIA DEL OSO, and we can all relax now… at least for a little while!

I loved lab today! I was looking forward to it all morning, and it was so nice to be able to watch the rest of that video and learn about the diversity of animals! I enjoyed taking a break from annotating, but I am sure that we will get started with that again next week!

URSA Scholars Week was so exciting! I was ready to present our posters to a lot of people, but unfortunately only two ladies came by . It was a lot of fun though, and I liked looking at the other posters in the BSB! Everyone did such a great job!

I was nervous about presenting our posters in class today, but it ended up being a great experience! By presenting to each other during lab today, I feel much more confident and excited about presenting for URSA Scholars week tomorrow! I am looking forward to telling people about our wonderful program and the progress we have made. I am no longer nervous to present tomorrow, but proud to be able to present the accomplishments from the Bears in the Sea!

I thought that everyone did such a wonderful job on their posters. I can imagine that Dr. Adair and Dr. Gibbon had difficulties choosing which two posters to print. Congratulations to Laura, Josh, Andrew, Anna, Chelsea, and Meredith! I am happy your posters were chosen!

Finally finished with our poster!

I cannot wait to see how everyone else’s posters turned out next Tuesday, and I am looking forward to URSA!

I’ll be honest, when we were told we had to make a scientific poster in a week, I began to panic… but in the end, it was so much fun! I am so grateful that we had a template to follow, and it was really fun to look through all of the pictures from last semester and put them on the poster! I did not remember everything we did in lab last semester, so it was a good review as well. It was nice to be able to take a break from annotating, but now I am ready to get started again… I am eager to find out the function of Benedict’s genes!

Sic’ em Bears!

I just wanted to say that I am so proud to be a member of the HHMI Science Education Alliance! Hearing everyone’s comments during the video conference today reminded me of what a privilege this is. I feel so blessed that I got to know the other 23 students in this program so well, and I am very proud of everything we have accomplished. I feel like I have grown due to the research we have done, learned more about myself, and broadened my understanding of science. Without a doubt, I would recommend this program to all prospective students. It has definitely not always been easy (the challenging material, procedures, and frustrating computer problems), but it has definitely been worth it! I don’t know what I am going to do in a normal class next year without all of you, Dr. Gibbon, and Dr. Adair!

Lab went by so fast today! I was completely prepared to phamerate away… but then we ended up in powerpoint with a poster in the process!

I thought it was so much fun to choose a template and start filling in the wet lab information. I realize that I have forgotten some of the procedures, so I will have to do a little bit of reviewing before Scholar’s Day! I am curious as to how all of the posters will end up looking, and I am excited for URSA!

After only annotating two genes last Thursday, I was determined to make some headway today. I managed to do Blast searches for all eight of my genes, determine the conserved regions of all eight, and start the pham information for half of them. I still need to add the Pham circle pictures, but I think it’s going pretty well. It did help, however, that a few of my genes came up with no matches after doing a Blast search, preventing me from determining their gene function. Many of my other genes had an expect value that was too high, eliminating the need to determine their gene function.

I hope I am doing all of this right! Half the time I think I am forgetting something, but it is slowly but surely starting to make sense!