Oysters Galore

Hello everybody,

The past two weeks have been pretty crazy at work! I started helping out with a project for a Master's student which involves baby oysters. The processing started to get pretty complex due to the size of the baby oysters - they're about the size of my pinky nail! Shucking them was not an easy task, nor was blending them to produce a homogenate we could work with! We had to get creative but we were able to produce a protocol that works.

I've also been doing lots of coding with years of plankton and Vibrio spp. data, which has been a great learning experience. Coding is complicated and has a steep learning curve, but I feel that I'm starting to get the hang of it.

Yesterday we went out on the Great Bay again for Surveillance and collected lots of oysters, sediment, water, and plankton. Today I streaked the bacteria that we grew onto ChromAgar plates and tomorrow we will observe the colors of the colonies that grew and move those onto new agar for further isolation so that they can be used for molecular work at the end of this week!

All is well in the land of oysters!
-Audrey