My week was mostly spent in NUIG with my course coordinator Galina and my lab partner, here I learned how to carry out extraction of DNA from a Haemonchus contortus. This is the parasite my partner will be carrying out his master’s project on. Post extraction I learned how to perform washing and elution of the DNA extracted from the worm and then we performed PCR.

This was my first time to carry out this laboratory work and it worked successfully, we were also shown how to perform qPCR on our samples. However, we could not make a quantitative PCR as we do not have other samples of DNA present to compare the levels in the sample, because we extracted the DNA form the worm and not the eggs of the sample.