During the last few months, I’ve been working on a number of different areas of my PhD to try and make sure that everything is progressing. Starting with lab work (as this is the most interesting bit at the moment). I have been more targeted with my lab work and have been trying to get specific groups of organisms to work with DNA barcoding to help explain some of the diversity that is present in the zooplankton community. There are some species that become more morphologically distinct as they develop but have indistinguishable early life stages. The barcoding work I have been doing has identified that, in some cases, there are more species present in the community than can be identified just with barcoding. At the moment, this has been used as part of my work identifying what species are present in the Falkland Islands zooplankton community. I’m not sure how much further detail I’ll be able to go into this (the PhD deadline is looming ever closer), but I have been running a few different PCRs to see what can be done. It’s quite interesting to see how the different identification techniques can be used in combination, with one technique able to fill in the gap of another.
Morphology of specific life stages can sometimes hide species diversity.
Back in December, a lot of my lab work was fish larvae specific, and they have also had some more focus recently. When running a PCR, you have a product called ‘primers’ which are used to attach to the DNA sequence, and this is what is amplified for a DNA barcode, and identification. For some of the fish species, the section of DNA that I had amplified does not show the species variation suggested by the names of the species matches. To see if there’s an easy way to observe this genetic variation, I have been running PCRs with a range of different primers, with the aim to string these together into a much longer DNA sequence. Hopefully by the next one of these blog posts, I’ll have had some interesting results from that work.
For something a bit different, last month we had the University of Aberdeen Postgraduate Conference, where I gave a presentation about my project. This was the first research conference I have presented at in my PhD, and it was interesting to see what other research is going on the department here. My talk seemed to be well received, and I enjoyed presenting some of the results from some of the more recent data analysis I have been doing, which included looking at the changing seasonal species diversity at each of my three sampling sites, and looking at how the similarity of the community composition varied between seasons. It was great to see that the variation in composition appears to be cyclical – which might be what you would expect, but it’s nice to see the analysis support that. I’m looking forwards to spending more time on these analyses and getting more detail about what’s going on in this community.
Using additional DNA sequences to help identify fish species within the same genus
