Day 18

Today was a pretty uneventful day for me. I went to the lab today, but no one was working on their experiments. Everyone was using the computers to compile data and do research, so I did some more research about PCR and ELISA in order to refresh my memory and started my lab journal that I am going to keep track of all my experiments and procedures. Tina came in mid-morning and sat down with me to explain my project. She had just talked with Dr. Li about it. My project concerns Bt cotton evaluations. I am going to use tissue of cotton and co-culture them with Agrobacterium in order to infuse them with the Bt gene. Then, I will grow them in a medium that will only support the embryos that have the Bt gene in them. Then, I will grow the successful embryos and use PCR, ELISA, and Insect Bioassay in order to locate the Bt gene. As far as I can gather so far, an insect bioassay determines the toxicity the Bt cotton will have on certain insects, such as the cotton bollworm for which is designed to protect itself against. Using this data, I will determine the effectiveness of Bt cotton. There are still some major details about my project that we have to hammer out, but these are the basics of it. At least now I have something specific to research and determine the exact direction and hypothesis I will use and test.
After lunch, everyone continued on the computers, so I continued with my research. Alex and Tina found me some scientific articles that I could use for my background information. It takes me quite awhile to get through these papers because there are so many technical words that I don’t know the definitions of, so I have to do a lot of cross research. I only read through two papers after lunch do to this. Tomorrow I will begin ELISA on my samples of Bt and wild cotton in order to learn the procedures. A graduate student named Cici, yes the same as my cat, is supposed to help me, but I don’t think she speaks much English, so it should be interesting.