Monday, March 12, 2012

DNA


Tomorrow is the big day.

As part of an honors project, this semester, I'm going to attempt to sequence some DNA from one of my pet tarantulas. This is the first time I've ever attempted to directly work with genetics. I'm extremely excited, to say the least.

The spider we're using is one of my 1-year-old Psalmopeus irminia spiderlings that I bred myself. We're going to convince it to drop one of it's #3 legs, and we'll use that to attempt to extract the DNA. I should know by tomorrow night if we have successfully extracted any.

In two weeks, we will be using a primer to try and isolate a portion of DNA for sequencing. If we're successful, we're publishing it to an online database of DNA segments. This would be the first segment published for this species.