Week 33 1/3 Ella Eleven

 Hi everybody!

 This last week was great. Monday, IDing and catching up on lab stuff. Tuesday, UNM, processed samples and ran the Kingfisher RNA extraction. Wednesday, set every trap on the historic route! Thursday, ID all the mosquitos that came in from Buffalo Turbine, done by the other interns + Jess earlier in the week. Friday, we got to see the UNM people present during a poster session! Jeremy and Hailey are the two summer students who helped us a lot with the lab work, and they put together a poster summarizing the work they've done so far with the WNV testing. It was really cool! I have a group photo but it hasn't been sent to me yet and I didn't want to put off the blog post any longer. 

I like doing the lab stuff, it keeps me fresh with more molecular work, and now that I know how to do it (and have a very solid procedure written by Jeremy and Hailey) it's fun to just sit and work.

We have been seeing more vexans this week than previous weeks, at the beginning it was allll vexans -> then all quinquefasciatus -> now mostly vexans. Fun stuff. We also saw some fun ones, a really nice Psophora, a site with five (!!) Anopheles, super rare over here. I need to take photos of those though!

Here's some other photos for now. First is a full vialing session on display- the white tin is all Vexans and males which don't get vialed! All this is just from our historic route. Buffalo Turbine can be as many as this, but we've been pooling the aegypti, which helps.

Next is from the processing step, all Culex specimens here! They get beat up in a tissue lyser to release all that lovely WNV RNA.