Urbanization Spectrum of Vector Culex Mosquitos Research Opportunity

  After a week's hiatus to prevent blog monotony, I'm back! Summer session two is in full swing at UMD, and I've been immersed in Medical Terminology. It's proving to be an excellent foundation for my Anatomy course this fall, as the subjects frequently intersect. At the Fritz Lab, the mosquito mayhem continues unabated. For each mosquito in the squish prep, the thoraxes are kept to ID the percentage of each species of mosquitoes in the trap later on. As such, we’ve reached a critical mass of thoraxes, completely depleting our freezer box supply! Ben and I have started pooling the thoraxes of mosquitoes into a single tube for each species for every trap night, but it has only freed up a singular freezer box. Further efforts of pooling will be needed next week.   Ben works hard to pool the mosquitoes and free up some freezer boxes.  This week’s fieldwork took us to the bustling Inner Harbor for trap setup. The challenge of finding parking in this tourist hot spot forced...

  During the second week of July, Dr. Fritz's lab ran out of Ben’s squish prep buffer along with positive Culex species controls. Instead of PhD student Ben Gregory preparing more of these solutions for me, he thought it would be best to teach me how to make the buffer! The protocol to make more of these reagents requires proteinase and RNAase-free water that is communally shared in the lab. To use this water we had to pour the bottle high above an Eppendorf tube before using a graduated cylinder to avoid any contamination. Now that I know how to make squish prep buffer myself; I am better able to act independently in the lab. But there was another problem … without positive Culex restuans , and Cx. pipens controls, the PCR protocol could not identify the cryptic species! Therefore we had to do a protocol that Ben dreaded doing; DNA Extraction using the Qiagen DNeasy Blood & Tissue Kit. Just like the RNA extraction procedure I learned two weeks ago this procedure r...

  The first week of July was  a short week  in terms of trapping. On Monday Ben, Izi, and I set up traps at the UMD Medical Campus Police Station, Queenstown Park, and the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge. The Patuxent Wildlife Refuge is the prettiest place we have set traps this trapping season by far! Now that it is July, we are going back through the 24 site locations to re-trap. As the summer progresses, the community distribution often changes resulting in different  species of Culex  peaking at  different  times. According to previous studies,  Culex  restuans  peak first near the end of spring, while  pipens  peak in June and July. 1 During the downtime of sorting and identifying Culex, Izi and I had the opportunity to learn more about other laboratory techniques of RNA isolation with an RNAeasy miniprep kit, along with qualifying controls used to determine the quantity of RNA isolated.   To start the RNA isolation pro...