Taking Charge of Research

This week my role at the lab changed a little bit. I was assigned to be the one in charge of the lab because my team traveled to Darien to do field work for the whole week. After some talking, we decided that it was best for me to stay in the city because I need to keep working with my presentation, and also keep analyzing samples with the MALDI. Besides this, someone needed to take care of the mosquitoes in the lab. I felt really surprised when my mentor told me he trusts me to be in charge of the mosquitoes this week. This is really significant to me because this means I have shown some progress in these last five weeks.

This last Monday I had an intense training of what my duties were going to be at the lab; this includes feeding the mosquitoes and larvae, take out adult mosquitoes, kill them, identify them with the microscope, put them in vials to preserve them, learn how to write the codes in the record book and process the new samples we got last week. They have been teaching me these things these last five weeks, but this time was crucial to learn everything right because I was going to be without a supervisor at the lab. I made notes of everything and asked a lot of questions.

The following day I started at the lab by myself; there was only one mosquito that I wasn’t able to identify but everything else went right. I left that mosquito as pending so whenever they come back they can help me to identify it. In the afternoon, I washed all the ovitraps because this upcoming week we are going again to five provinces in “Peninsula de Azuero” to leave the ovitraps there. I am really excited to do field work again because this time I already know what to expect and my knowledge in the field has increased.

This week I received the results from our samples that were analyzed by Callum with the gas chromatography-mass spectrometer at the Smithsonian. Unfortunately, results weren’t as good as we expected because they showed that the samples had some contamination. This upcoming week we will be meeting with Callum again to discuss our collection strategies and methods. In the meantime, I have been reading information about gas chromatography and collection methods. I hope this next week we can get better results with the gas chromatography.

This week I also went to the lab to continue analyzing samples with the MALDI. The process of extracting protein from the mosquito eggs is long but now I feel I can do it without reading the protocol. I already finished analyzing the samples from “Tonosi” (a province where we placed an ovitrap). So far I have analyzed 85 mosquito eggs with the MALDI. This upcoming week I will be using these results to compare them with the data base and classify each egg. For this, I will be working with a student from the Latin University of Panama. He is a biomedical engineering student and he is in charge of creating an algorithm to classify the eggs. I consider that the experience of working with people from different fields is amazing because I have been learning a lot from them as they learn from me. I am looking forward to my last weeks of research in Panama. I am pretty sure that I will continue to enrich myself with knowledge and at the same time have fun!