These past few days, I have had a ton of fly work. I've been making crosses and collecting virgins. The nice or bad thing about fly work is that it comes in waves, but I'm very happy with how my fly work is progressing. I'm almost at the point where I'll be getting results. Skip this if you don't want the details- I'm using PiggyBac transposons to generate small deletions of specific genes. By crossing two lines of flies with the transposon inserted at different locations, and then using flp-recombinase to induce mitotic recombination, the small deletions will be generated. This takes some generations, and I need to some way to identify the progeny of the fly, from which the event happened. Some of the events are easy to identify, such as knowing that flies with white eyes have the deletion, but for others, I need to make many crosses and from those crosses, hopefully identify some for which the recombination event took place, which is the point I'm at now.

I've been disappointed with my other work, but at least it has taught me a lesson, which is to be very careful. I was generating a mutation in a plasmid with my target DNA inserted into it, and at the end I needed to digest away the original plasmid, so that I could transform cells with the mutated DNA, but I forgot to, and ended up transforming cells, which picked up the plasmid without the mutation. When I was checking to see if any cells had the mutated plasmid, I found only negatives, and that was very frustrating. At least, now I will start over and attempt to be as thorough as possible.

This 4th of July I went to Fisherman's Wharf to see the fireworks. It was pretty foggy, so some of the fireworks were colored fog, but I did see peace signs and smiley faces. I also went to Muir Woods to see the redwoods last weekend. The trees are so tall and amazing. In the gift shop, they were selling redwoods and sequoias to grow yourself. Anywhere with a coastal climate. I wish I could take one or more back to Ohio.