Day 10: First set of lab rotations at Cal State Fullerton

CSUF has been our home for the last 2 days and will remain so for another 8 days. This will take us through two rounds of lab rotations. There are 4 groups of students, who rotate through 4 lab exercises in the first week. Then, they will rotate through 4 more the second week. My graduate student (Blake Stamps) and I have been responsible for taking each group through extraction of DNA from samples collected in the field and amplifying the rRNA genes of bacteria and archaea. For those who don’t know, we can use these genes to determine which microorganisms are present in a sample and relatively how many there are of each type. This is a big deal. We have over 60 samples and will be sequencing between 1,000 and 10,000 genes from each sample. We will use this data to see how the microbial communities change with distance to the hot spring source, depth in microbial mats, and that are associated with geological features like the carbonate nodules that form on the side of the creek (see below).

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