It's been a while, but the polar science continues!

It's very likely that no one is reading this anymore. "Emma made it back safely. Her Seattle life is so boring, what could she have to post about??" The majority of the work I need to do on this project started when my samples arrived at University of Washington. All of my sea ice-bacteria samples are captured on filters, after those hours of melting and filtering in Antarctica. We weren't sure of the best way to get the cells off the filters, so we had to develop and test a protocol on some test samples. We grew a lab strain of cold-loving bacteria, tried to mimic the cell counts we estimate are in our actual samples, and we tested protocols on those samples.

We used tiny beads and a cell lysis buffer to shear the cells from the filter for protein extractions.

We had 4 different concentrations of cells in our tests and we tested 3 differed protocols. This plot shows how many proteins we detected for each of those samples.

After those tests, it was time to extract proteins from the samples I collected in Antarctica. I was pretty nervous about this. I can't just go back and get more samples if I mess it up. It took weeks of lab work since there were multiple steps and I had 64 filters, but earlier this week we had all the samples ready and we ran some quick tests on the mass spectrometer to see if we could detect any proteins. Things look promising and we're excited to move forward to collect data on all the samples.

This looks like nothing to most of you, but we think we see evidence of Antarctic bacterial proteins in this mass spectrometry data. We are very excited!

This is also the week that I will be submitting a grant to the Joint Genome Institute with the hopes of getting approved for full metagenomics sequencing of the other set of samples I brought back from the ice. "Meta" refers to community, and if we get the grant we will sequence the community genomes from all the samples we collected to see how the bacterial community changes as the ice begins to warm during the seasonal transition. Keep your fingers crossed for me!