Rachael Burson – Biotechnological Engineering – week 2

Aloha,

My partner Yash and I have been assigned a phenotyping project. Phenotypes are the physical characteristics of plants. One such characteristic is growth rate. The professors goal is to understand how plants growth rate changes based on environment. This is possible because Hawaii has a large range of climates from one side of the island to another.

Yash and I had a meeting with a colleague of one of the undergraduates in our lab. He showed us the image analysis software called imageJ. We learned how to process our images using a Macro called find green. This will find all the green of an image and turn everything else black. We can then take the area of green pixels and use that as our rate of growth data. We are also going to adjust the macro to find red. With that we will put a red dot at the tip of the fourth leaf and a red dot at the bottom of the stem. We will then have the macro give us the shortest path through green pixels to connect the two closest red pixels. This length over time will serve as a secondary rate of growth data point.

As previously stated the professor wants to learn about rate of growth and how that changes in different environments. To achieve this we have two fields on either side of the island. The Waimanalo field and the Magoon field. In preparation for our phenotype project Yash and I have planted seeds in the waimanalo feild and will plant in the Magoon feild on Monday. Our goal is the have the phenotype imagining box ready by the time our plants have a fourth leaf emerging.

In the realm of molecular biology I made final calls on the mutant genotype of eight plant for two genetic mutants (opr8 and opr7). I also collected samples in the field to be processed next week for plants who came up inconclusive in genotype.

While I am still struggling to find much free time outside of work I did manage to go to the beach on Saturday. This is taken from a peer on lower Wakiki beach. The mountain peaking out in the back is actually Diamond Head.

Aloha,

Rachael Burson