I start my day off by "picking pupae". Pupae are the stage of life of a mosquito right before it emerges as an adult, flying, insect. I pick them out of the pans they hatch in, and put them into cages where they will emerge as adults, but cannot escape. This picture shows the incubator we keep pupae pans in. If you look closely, you can see mosquito larvae, they are longer and touching the surface so they can breath.
Next I usually take care of the adult mosquitoes by feeding them (yes on my arm...you all might have seen twitpics of this....) and collecting eggs, putting in new cups for them to lay eggs in, and collecting individual females for a specific part of my project. In this picture, you can see larvae pans on top, mosquito cages in the middle shelves, and then on the bottom shelf, small individual "icecream carton" cages for individual females so I can get eggs from individual females, and know they were the only female laying those eggs.
Today I started isolating DNA from the individual females I've already collected and gotten eggs from. I will be analyzing their DNA to look for unique genetic sequences for which I've designed a detection system (called primers for use in melting curve PCR for anyone who has any idea what I'm talking about...) In this picture you can see my tubes of ground up mosquitoes on the hot plate at the top of the picture, the ice bucket used for keeping samples cold while I'm working with them, and the centrifuge for spinning my samples to concentrate the mosquito material to the bottom of the tube (it spins around really fast and centrifugal force pulls the heavy particulates down to the bottom)
This is where I wash dishes...mostly mosquito pans after they are all adults, I don't really use a lot of glassware, most undergrad students put in a lot of hours washing glassware. Unfortunately we don't have one of those in our lab...
So, I hope you learned something today about my lab and what I do! Yay for science:)
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