This was my first day back in Woods Hole at the MBL, this time for the Strategies and Techniques for Analyzing Microbial Populations (STAMPS) course. The first thing I did when I arrived yesterday was jump in the ocean. After swimming in Ithaca’s gorges all summer, the salty seawater feels so buoyant. The first thing I did this morning was go for a run around Eel Pond and the MBL campus. It feels great to be back, but it’s definitely a bit weird to be here without the whole Microbial Diversity crew from last summer. I think this will be a different sort of experience, and I just need to accept that. There are 60 students, which makes it feel a bit hard to really get to know everyone, especially in just 10 days. I was excited to hear a few other people are interested in soils during our reception introductions last night, but I haven’t had a chance to catch them all yet to chat.

Once again, I feel in a bit over my head, which is basically how I like it. Many people here already have sequence data in hand, which I won’t be generating until this fall, from my field experiment. I guess the flip side of that is that I’ll have the chance to make good front-end decisions. I learned a lot from Hilary Morrison‘s discussion of primer design for Illumina MiSeq this morning, which I will apply when I’m choosing primers for my own samples. So, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot, but I’m very eager to start applying it to my own work. I’m glad that I’m already comfortable in Unix, and have some experience with QIIME and mothur.

A fortuitous thing happened during our evening lab. I had to look in my junk mail folder to find a confirmation email form our course wiki, and while there, I discovered that I was awarded the second prize in the Soil Ecology Society meeting’s oral presentation competition! I probably would never have looked in my junk mail otherwise, so it was really lucky!

This article was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Illumina, MBL, primer design, soil ecology society, STAMPS, Woods Hole.