My name is Mega Patel (pronounced just like it sounds) and I am a second year Biochemistry major at UCLA. I joined Team Marmot because I love all branches of the sciences, and the Blumstein lab seemed like a great place to expand my knowledge on science outside of chemistry. And my name is Lawrance Chung, a third year Biology major at UCLA. I decided to join Team Marmot because I secretly want to be a marmot. Joke aside, I felt that this lab would be a wonderful opportunity to expand my research experience.
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| Sorting the poop! |
Since September 2011, we have been a part of the Blumstein lab. For the first few weeks we did some of the dirtier work, but we know that the resulting data is worth it. We sorted through fecal samples, from the RMBL group, the tagged wild marmots in Colorado, and the captive group, a control group housed at Colorado State University by Greg Florant from which experimental validations of our assays were carried out. Our work is done directly under the mentorship of Dr. Jennifer Smith (shown below).
Jennifer Smith with a captive marmot at
Colorado State University
Colorado State University
The purpose of sorting these fecal samples was to get an accurate measurement on how stressed each particular marmot is on a day-to-day basis. While hair samples can provide an idea of how stressed one was months ago, and blood can be used to measure how stressed a particular individual is within a matter of minutes (reflecting trap stress), fecal samples can actually measure how stressed the marmots were yesterday (before the trapping event), which is exactly the kind of data this lab wants to add to its database.
Greg Florant with a captive marmot at
Colorado State University
Like you might have already guessed, we measure the “stress” level of marmots by measuring the concentration of glucocorticoids in their processed fecal samples. The process begins by sort through the fecal sample to obtain a pure sample. This means removing the different fibers, seeds, and occasionally rocks from the sample after creating a nicely mixed bag of feces that we fondly liked to call poo-dough. Then after a single sample was cleaned,it was carefully weighed to 0.20 grams. The accuracy of the weight was very important and we took great care in measuring the samples as close to 0.20grams each as we could. This precision was necessary so that the resulting concentrations of the glucocorticoids could be compared among different marmots. A larger weight could mean a higher concentration, causing the data to reflect the marmot being more stressed than it actually was. In addition, each marmot sample was carefully labeled with an unique ID to ensure that samples from different marmots were not mixed.
Currently we are sorting through and labeling blood and plasma samples from different marmots dating as far back as 2002 and have been preserved in a -80 ˚C freezer. The sorting process involves going through and individually labeling each vial with a unique ID. This sounds much easier than it is because we have to first be able to match up the vial to the correct entry in our database, which does not always happen as sometimes the dates or time will be off. Then comes the tricky part of trying to write on a frozen vial, however, with the help of Emery and Rachel, we have made great progress and will be done within the first week of next quarter.
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