My host supervisor in Virginia Tech, Aureliano, was away in South America when I arrived, and I had to wait for him to get back to work out some of the final details of the work I’d be doing. So for the first few weeks, I was kept busy with Vidyo-ing in on lectures in NUI Galway and keeping up with assignments where possible. Once settled in and registered with my Hokie Passport (a Virginia Tech student card), the lab manager, Earl sent me the protocol for the cDNA library preparation and I began learning about the process.
Once Aureliano arrived back, we began some bio-informatics classes at lunchtime, it started out with just ourselves and his other student – Sophie, a PhD candidate doing one of her rotations with Aure – but very quickly other students from around Latham hall joined in and we had ourselves a nice little study group. Aureliano taught us the basics of using Linux in the terminal, eventually progressing to using TopHat to analyse sample genomic data. While I was there I was also given the opportunity to sit in on a post-graduate class on R, which Aureliano was teaching. As I was not familiar with the basics of R, I found this class much more difficult to keep up with, but I feel like I still learned a bit from it (and I didn’t have to do the assigned project for it since I was just tagging along).
In addition to these classes, I was also working through my 24 wheat RNA samples taken from the field trial of the previous year (2017). These samples had been collected and by the previous researcher, Dr Melanie Thomas, who also extracted the RNA and sent them to Virginia Tech, where they were stored at – 80ºC before I took over the project. In the beginning, Earl went through some of his own samples with me so I could observe, before supervising me while I prepared cDNA from my wheat samples. The process was simple enough to follow once I got the hang of it. It took a long time from start to finish, but this was mostly due to many short periods of incubation times. During these wait times Earl and I – and whoever else was in the lab at the time – would chat about music, whiskey, and sometimes we cautiously delved into local politics – always bearing in mind that although in a university town, I was still a guest in a State below the Mason-Dixon line. One of Earl’s favourite topics to teach me about (in addition to dos and don’ts of cDNA library prep) was deer hunting – a popular sport in Virginia. I learned a lot about the ecological effects of hunting for culling purposes, the different seasons for it, and the various equipment used. I never had the heart to tell Earl I was vegan.
