China Research

Lab Experiments and Berry Picking Adventure!

In my lab, we have been researching the embryonic development of the shark Scoliodon laticaudus, which is commonly fished as a food source in the Fujian province. We buy pregnant female sharks from a street market vendor in Xiamen and dissect them in the lab in order to remove the embryos from the mother’s uterus. The embryos range in size, anywhere from 1 - 30 cm. The main purpose of the research is to determine where the gonads begin to develop in embryos and to observe how this growth progresses throughout the stages of embryonic development.

One of the most memorable cultural experiences for me was taking the opportunity to go berry picking with my lab mates. The English translation of these berries was “wax berries,” a dark red or purple fruit that does not grow in the United States. I had tasted these berries once before and I absolutely loved them, so I was excited to venture out to pick them by hand. Before leaving for the day long trip, I had pictured myself picking berries at an American style orchard, but when we arrived I was surprised to find out that the wax berries, which I had been practically drooling over the entire car ride, were located at the very top of a mountain! After about an hour of maneuvering through trees and ducking under low branches, we reached the top of the mountain. After picking our basket of berries, the entire group took a long rest at the top of the mountain, eating our wax berries as we looked out over the ocean.

After slipping in and sliding all the way back down the mountain, we stumbled across a local seafood restaurant for dinner. The building was set up on some sort of floating device so it stood alone out on the water. There was a man there who paddled customers from the land to the restaurant on a small wooden ferry, as simple as a large plank of wood. As a group we ordered every kind of seafood imaginable. The meal was delicious! Everything about that day was completely unexpected, but I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

A Boring Week Leads to a Magical Weekend!!!

Well where should i begin, with the mundane week or the magical weekend… I think i will make you suffer first!! haha. Well the second week in lab sure was a bore, my project all but derailed within the first few minutes Monday morning. My Professor arrived back from Hong Kong and informed me that my project was being put on hold for up to two weeks!!!!!!!!!! There were two reasons he gave for this, first one of our lab mates was giving his masters thesis defense on Tuesday morning, and second two of my other lab mates are leaving for a three month Arctic research cruise on June 18th. Thus all lab equipment must be devoted to helping those going on the cruise prepare. So in effect i gather that i will not be starting my research in earnest until the week of June 21. This will leave me under three weeks to complete my project which is quite a tight schedule. Other then that the lab has been fun, my lab mates are great and im sad to see two of them leave in just under a week (who am i going to play Badminton with now haha).

Well lets move on to the good stuff!! On this past Saturday all the Eckerd students and Professor Duncan went to go see a tǔlóu or 土樓 in simplified Chinese characters. The translation from Chinese is earthen building. They are extraordinary structures constructed from the 15th century up until the 1950’s by the Hakka people of Fujian Province. On July 7, 2008 UNESCO added the Tulou’s of Fujian Province to the World Heritage List under the moniker Hakka Houses. These structures are breathtaking they are basically an entire village enclosed into an area smaller then a football pitch. Some of the larger tulou’s contained 800 or more people at some point during there existence.

We had an amazing tour guide her name was Miss Zhang she took us to many different sites and even took us to her home town, which was a little town which did not pander to tourists like some of the other villages. Her town used the tourism dollars it earned to enhance the experience not hinder it like some of the other Hakka villages. We all sat in her mothers little tea shop drank tea, and talked for about it an hour it was truly a wonderful experience. She was also a wonderful tour guide as she took us to four different Tulou sites and gave us great insight at each location.

The tulou’s were an interesting mix of old and new. We went to one in which no commercialization had occurred and we went to others that were basically tourist traps in old buildings. It definitely shows how China’s rush to modernize has been both good an bad. I hope these communities are able to survive as more then tourist destinations. The Hakka People have a wonderful and unique culture and they should preserve as much of it as they can!!!!!!!

Now the final touch to an amazing weekend occured sunday morning around 4 A.M. Beijing time. THE UNITED STATES TIED ENGLAND IN THEIR FIRST GROUP STAGE MATCH. I stayed up to watch the game and was elated by the result. England has arguable the best team in the world cup, and the US a team full of no names tied them. I bet most Americans can name three players at best (Tim Howard, Clint Dempsey, and Landon Donnovan). Well as a huge football fan (yes football not soccer) i could not be happier i wish the US team my best and hope they can advance far beyond the Group Stages. Well that’s it for this week  keep tuning in for more up dates!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Taking off the training wheels

There finally came a point at which my lab mate/mentor Yanan had to let me fly solo.  Yesterday, my first day of unsupervised lab procedures, was not exactly a success.  In fact, it was pretty embarrassing.  Literally the minute Yanan left the room, the PCR machine broke in my hands.  As I lifted up the handle of the precious machine, a minor combustion occurred.  Bolts, nuts, and other important items flew from the machine! Horrified, I could not believe that this $3000 machine decided that now was the time to self-destruct.  Luckily a lab tech was able to fix the damages.  Although I am convinced that I did not do anything wrong, the lab tech thought I was completely incompetent.  A good start to the day.  Following this debacle was an even better end to the day.  Basically, I forgot a tiny (but crucial) step within a procedure, and ruined my day’s work.  OOPS.

Yes, this was extremely discouraging.  But today I managed to turn things around!  I am sure Yanan was nervous to leave me alone again, but she took a sick leave anyways. Yesterday I messed up while she was just on another floor, how much trouble could I get into with her gone completely?!  Actually, I managed to successfully end the day with no mishaps; and my results turned out very good! In conclusion, lab work can be overwhelming.  Instead of getting upset with me yesterday, Yanan simply said that each mistake equaled a new opportunity to learn.  How insightful. Today I got back on the horse, opened that PCR machine, and showed it who is boss.  I finished today in a good mood.

Good news!! I may have discovered a new sub-species of polychaete.  Laugh if you want, but I am excited.  As I said in my last entry, I needed to go worm collecting in order to start my project.  While buying worms at the bait shop was enjoyable, collecting polychaetes was AWESOME.  Yanan, Holly, and I went by train, bus, and finally boat in order to get to the floating fish farms.  Honestly, nobody could give me a clear answer on what the fish farms actually do- I guess it is a very primative aquaculture system.

The fish-farmer let us collect polychaetes from a marine ecosystem which magically appeared onto the wooden planks we were carefully balanced on.  The rope which the fish-farmer pulled up from the water had attached colorful tunicates, mussels, crabs, brittle stars, and a million other types of moving marine organisms.  That afternoon I spent searching for worms was the most fun I have had in Hong Kong.  When we got back to the lab, I identified the polychaetes through last entry’s procedure.  However, there were some weirdo polychaetes which were not identified in the book.  Luckily, they are in the genus which I am doing my phylogenetic study on.  So my project became about 100x more interesting, because now I am trying to identify if these polychaetes (3 with the same teeth patterns!) are genetically as well as morphologically different from the others in the study.  Even if my results come back indicating that all the subspecies are genetically similar, this is still a significant finding.  The separation of subspecies due to paragnath (teeth) positioning will be irrelevant.  However, I hope there are genetic differences in the subspecies.  I already have big plans for this worm, known around the lab as: Perinereis cultrifera gretchenia (Just kidding.)

Update from the People’s Republic

I am now on my second week of research and my project is coming along despite a number of setbacks. Last week, after injecting the Chinese black sleepers with hormones to elicit spawning, we put a male and female into a tank and recorded their activities hoping to observe spawning. Because the Chinese black sleeper spawns at night or very early in the morning, this means a very late night for my lab partner, Yuan, and me. Luckily we were able to record the events using a security camera; however, after watching the tapes the next morning we realized the recordings were not clear enough to tell the male from the female and we also observed no spawning. After the failed spawning experiment, we dissected the female and saw that many of her eggs were beginning to degrade and could not be fertilized which may have been why spawning was not observed.

This morning, we went to the market and bought new Chinese black sleepers in hopes that they will be more successful in our spawning experiments. We will repeat our injections and experiment in the following days.

As far as outside of the lab, life in Xiamen continues to be exciting. I have been amazed as to the level of excitement towards basketball and the NBA here in China. It reminds me of how excited people were for basketball back in the days of Michael Jordan. Sports have been one of the biggest topics for conversation with people inside my lab and we even played basketball with some of the Chinese students.

Over the weekend, I went with Yuan and visited the Nanputuo Temple which is a Buddhist temple that was founded back in the Tang Dynasty. One of the monks is a friend of hers and we were able to get a tour of the temple. The most exciting part was eating at the cafeteria at the temple which was quite an experience. The cafeteria is usually for the monks only so it was Yuan and I eating with about a hundred monks. As we were going to eat, Yuan started explaining all the rules to me and then informed me that no one was allowed to talk during the meal. This made for one of the most interesting meals I have ever had as I tried to remember all the rules without asking what to do. Overall, the visit to the temple was an awesome experience, and I am thrilled I was able to meet and talk with one of the monks.

It is still strange to me to be considered a foreigner for the first time in my life, and I know this experience will give me a much different view of the foreign students at Eckerd College. It has been very funny every time I get on the bus and have people staring at me and having people take pictures of us or even asking to take pictures with us.

Although some things here seemed so different initially, I am definitely starting to acclimate to living in Xiamen.

Anguilla japonica…

This last past week was one to remember, but before I start dishing out the juciy details, let me give you some background information. For starters, Anguilla japonica, or the Japanese Eel, is the species in which I will be working with this summer. The reason why my lab decided to work with this species in particular is because it is considered to be an euryhaline species which means that it can live and survive in wide range of salinities. This little fact is important because it makes it the perfect candidate for my lab’s research in osmoregulation. Now you may be asking yourself what exactly osmoregulation is, well osmoregulation is the active process that an organism uses in order to maintain homeostasis in its water content by means of altering its inorganic or organic osmolyte concentration. More specifically in our lab, we are studying and trying to understand the osmosensing mechanisms of the cell, or basically how the cell can tell when to change its volume.  So the first step in this process of understanding osmosensing within the cell of A. japonica is to extract what we need. Thats right, dissection.

So on Monday Oscar, the graduate student who I primarily work with, and I dissected an eel and retrieved the gills so that way we could continue on with our research for the week. However, this is not the whole story. This dissection was supposed to be my first, however, Oscar actually had to do the dissection because for some reason the eel did not fully take to the anesthetic and WOKE UP during the dissection! And as you may know an eel’s muscle reflex does not require oxygen, so even if the eel is not alive anymore the muscles can still reflex, which they did and the eel just kept moving! This was quite the experience!

I was a little worried when we had to do some more dissections on Wednesday, but everything went smoothly which was great because this time I had remove the gills! But as for the rest of the week, I learned the protocol for primary gill cell culture which is a very good and useful technique to know! This technique allows us to retrieve the cells we need in order to continue on with our research. From there we then can treat the cells with different salinities and extract the proteins in order to run a western blot. A western blot can then detect specific proteins within our samples. Specifically, this last week we looked for NHE-1 (sodium proton exchanger) and compared it to Actin (comparing to Actin can tell us if I loaded the gel correctly) just as a trial run because it was my first time performing a western blot by myself. I have actually started working very independently in the lab on techniques that I have learned, but I have still a lot of help and support from everyone around me which is just amazing! I should hopefully start working towards my individual research project starting this week so cross your fingers!

And as for the rest of HK, it is as great as usual!

My First Post….

Those of you who know me are aware that I don’t exactly blend in with polite society. I have poufy hair, wear old Chicago sports team shirts, and am generally unshaven, or what one of my labmates referred to as “hair face.” Being surrounded by straight haired, well-dressed, clean-shaven, counterparts doesn’t exactly provide an environment conducive for fading into the crowd. My 6’0, 200 pound frame in a sea of 5’7, 150 pound Chinese men only adds to this. While daunting at first, this situation has proved to be a pretty eye opening experience. For the first time in my life, I am in the vast minority. If I cared enough, I could clean up and shed my frequently homeless appearance and seamlessly assimilate into American society, but regardless of what I do here, I will still be one of the few foreigners that many of the students here in Xiamen have ever seen. I don’t know if this is a knock on America as much as it is a commendation of the Chinese, but we have been met with much more excitement and enthusiasm than what I anticipated. The Chinese have jumped at the opportunity to both welcome and interact with us, much more so than foreigners are typically treated to in America. Our culture’s differences have been points of exploration rather than segregation. They have really set the standard of how we all should view and treat people with different backgrounds than our own.

One of the major differences I have noticed in the lab environment here in comparison to Eckerd, is the pace at which work is done. At Eckerd, labs are usually pretty well organized and self-contained, with a clear and definitive set of accomplishments or outcomes expected in each lab section. The professors or TAs are present and everybody tends to work at a pretty healthy pace. Here, not so much. At least with my lab, the students come and go as they see fit, each working on their own projects at their own paces. Many of these projects are taking place over very long periods of time, so the whole concept of not really being done at the end of the days has taken some getting used to. There is a sense of urgency in labs at Eckerd because everything has to be done in a set time period. When they are working on yearlong projects, it is not the end of the world if not much gets done by the end of the day. For example, earlier this week I came in and processed some sediment samples from a core taken in the South China Sea. I placed pieces of the sediments into beakers, which we then put in an oven for six hours to dry. I was all ready to start the next step, but my lab mate informed me that there was really nothing else that could be done until they were dried and I could either look up more articles pertaining to my project or head back to my room to nap and get lunch. This just goes to show that research takes time, a lot of it, and out in the real world, not every project can be neatly tied together at the end of each three hour period.

Where as things have been moving a little slow to start out, on Monday I will begin examining the core samples using a Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) to determine the levels of pyrite in relation to the total organic carbon percentage with varying depths. To give you guys a brief idea of the purpose of this project, the level of pyrite is important because it is a byproduct of the oxidation of organic matter via sulfate reducing bacteria. Sulfate reduction is one step in a hierarchy of bacterially mediated processes that are used to oxidize organic matter. After all of the sulfate has been used up, the next step is the creation of methane, which forms what are known as methane gas hydrates. The idea is that if there is enough organic matter to get through sulfate reduction, indicated by pyrite formation, there is a high likelihood that there is enough organic matter to start the process of methanogenesis and the formation of these gas hydrates. This is all relevant because methane can be used as an alternative energy source to coal. I am excited to get these samples under the SEM and see where this project goes. I used some pretty big words at the end there so I will wrap this thing up. Hopefully I will have some good results the next time I check in.

Stay classy, San Diego……

Anthony Reporting from Xiamen

Welcome to my blog!!! Over the next six weeks I will be reporting my activities in the city of Xiamen in southeastern China. Our group consisting of four students arrived in Xiamen on Wednesday May 26 to begin an intensive six week scientific research program at Xiamen University, which located on the southern tip of Xiamen Island. Xiamen is a very interesting place it truly is a meeting of the old and new world. I will walk down one street and be in a beautiful westernized neighborhood and the next street over is a dilapidated neighborhood with beggars asking you for money. Being a westerner makes the beggars gravitate toward you because they believe if your a westerner in China you must have a lot of money. This fact is very disheartening so now i try to avoid the areas with beggars.

Over the past week our group has been slowly acclimating to mainland China. The Chinese culture as a whole is very different from ours, for instance it is taboo for one to eat food with his/her hands and the use of forks and knives is comical to most Chinese. As a westerner in China i have learned much even though I have only been here for a week. I have started to pick up some of the language and even successfully ordered a meal in Chinese yesterday!!!!! (albeit it was in very broken Chinese)  Other then that as a westerner i have been received very warmly by all the people i have met. Everyone is eager to hear stories about America and for many people i am the first westerner they have ever spoken with!!!

Moving on from the societal differences and being a westerner in China, lets dig into the good stuff…the scientific research!!!!!! On this past Monday i began my research which is focused on Organo-chlorine Pesticide (OCP) levels in Arctic Ocean sediments. The work is very tedious and takes a long time to complete because you first have to extract organic materials from the sediment, separate out the OCP’s, then concentrate the sample down so the OCP levels can be accurately measured. Since i am working with organic pollutants the laboratory has to be kept sterile to avoid contaminating the sample. All in all the work should be interesting and will give me valuable lab experience that can only help me in the future.

Welcome to China

Today was my second full day of research. My project is studying the reproductive behaviors of the Chinese black sleeper after being exposed to sex pheromones. Yesterday was spent walking around the city trying to find a factory that would build an artificial nest for our project. After failing at this, we were forced to construct our nest from plastic bottles. Today, I learned how to remove the urinary bladder and testes from the Chinese black sleeper and how to extract the pheromones from these. Many of the techniques that I have used at Eckerd will be used in my project here including GCMS and gel electrophoresis.

My lab work is about to get much more involving as well will be starting an experiment on Thursday night and we will be in the lab until at least 2am observing pairs of Chinese black sleepers reproducing.

As far as my interactions with people here, about half of my lab mates as well as my professor are somewhat fluent in English and are more than willing to learn English from me and teach me Chinese phrases. Outside of the lab, I have run into maybe five people that can speak any English whatsoever. This has created some interesting situations at the cafeteria and at different restaurants when we have no idea what something is and are forced to randomly point at a food dish. This has led to some very bad choices especially for Mike.

The city of Xiamen is much slower placed than Hong Kong is, but this is not to say there is not plenty to do. There are many markets, huge shopping malls, Buddhist temples, and even a very interesting aquarium to explore. The only parts of my experience that have been less than enjoyable are the lack of a washing machine and dryer which is terrible because nothing dries thanks to the humidity and the squat toilet which may possibly be the worst invention ever created.

Stay tuned for further updates…