Day 12 - the Hairy Roes

Day 12 - the Hairy Roes

That day I finally had a very vague idea of what my UROPS project is about

I am doing a research on a gene called VOX and to be honest, I don't have any idea of that gene except that the gene is expressed on stage 13 onwards in the fish embryo. Zhen Dong promised to send me a paper regarding VOX gene but until now I have not received it.

The first thing I have to do was to confirm the sequence of the VOX gene and to do that, there are multiple steps involved. The very first thing I did was to select the Medaka embryo which were already at stage 13 and above.

Medaka roes are very different from Zebrafish roes. While zebrafish's are smooth, medaka roes are hairy. The roes are clustered together with a very fine strands of brown fibre. Although the fibres were very fine and thin, they were very strong. The fastest way to separate them is to wind them around a pair of needle.

After selecting the embryos, I proceed to do a RNA isolation. I did not know what was wrong with me that day, maybe I was just to nervous to start my project, that I made lots of mistake. I forgot to aliquot the trizol reagent to smaller container and I even dropped my tip inside the bottle. I could sense that Yanyan who were there at that time was thinking that I was just a nuisance in the lab.

Foong Mei and Shen Qian had nothing to do so they wanted to join me in my experiment. I gave them some of my fish embryos. I guessed they were too lazy to select the embryo as they just took a bunch of them to the tube.

I did not finish my RNA isolation so I stopped at the washing steps.