On August 20th, Biology and Wildlife graduate students and researchers traveled to UAF's
Toolik Field Station for an awakening taste of arctic atmosphere. Devin and I used this nine hour road trip north of Fairbanks for investigation...in the 68th degree.
Toolik provided an opportunity to use the
MinION sequencing capabilities in the field and sample for microbes on the North Slope.
Soil sampling and DNA sequencing with the MinION was supplemented with an abundance of scarlet alpine bearberry (
Arctostaphylos alpina) and characteristically Alaskan Arctic beauty.
Undergraduate researcher Maddie McCarthy was recently awarded a BLaST Undergraduate Research Experience. Maddie will have a completely funded summer of research ahead of her. She'll be digging into the soil microbial communities of the Fairbanks Permafrost Experimental Station.
Thanks to the efforts of Ian Herriot who initiated the application to the Oxford Nanopore MinION Access programme (MAP), we have acquired access to a new nanopore sequencer (pictured above). The MinION at just 87 grams and half the size of an iPhone is so portable that it will visit the International Space Station as a proof of concept in remote collection of DNA sequence data. Working in collaboration with the IAB DNA Core Lab, the Drown lab will begin experimenting with this technology in the near future and expand access to potential undergraduate researchers in Spring 2016. This device can provide opportunities for student researchers to generate their own low cost DNA sequence data (as little as $500 / experiment).