The last few weeks have been a mixture of very tedious data analysis and exciting outreach. You might remember that a couple of months ago we sent off our little vial of hopes and dreams to an external sequencing company. A vial filled with the  amplified genes of over 700 wasps! Well, it turns out sorting through those data takes a really long time. 

The upside is that there is actually data to look through! The sequencing of our wasp DNA seems to have worked reasonably well, and we promise to keep you updated as we sort through it. It's just very slow going! Sometimes science happens quickly, and we have really fun days in the lab or the field. But good science also requires making sure any results you publish are correct, and that takes time. It's more than a little scary knowing I have less than a year left of my PhD (where did the time go?) but hopefully this might be the last big hurdle. 
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What's been a welcome break from data analysis has been a bunch of outreach events! We headed up to Murray Bridge High School and talked about wasps to year 7/8 students with Children's University Regional Lecture Series, and also visited a primary school to do some slime-making and dry ice demonstrations with the year three students (they were learning about states of matter). I also participated in the Three Minute Thesis Competition, and am off to the University Finals on the 12th September! Hooray for wasps!

This Friday 25 August, we're giving a family-friendly talk convincing you why you should love wasps! Find out more and come along here: https://www.scienceweek.net.au/why-you-should-love-wasps/ 
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What's next on the cards? Well, we're heading to Canberra for a conference in September, and then Mustard and I are off to Bush Blitz! Never head of Bush Blitz? Don't worry, we'll be writing a few posts as we get ready for the grand adventure, and the next one will explain everything you could ever want to know about why 20 scientists would go to the middle of nowhere for two weeks... stay tuned!

This vial that Mustard is holding in the above picture contains all the hopes and dreams of a PhD student. 25 microlitres of clear, colourless liquid. The result of weeks of lab work, and even more weeks of preparation. I felt like I should whisper some sort of hocus-pocus charm over it before putting it in the navy blue bag in the sample fridge for the courier to pick up the next day and transport it to the sequencing company. Instead, I managed to drop it just as I was putting it in the transport bag, spread the liquid into tiny droplets (hence increasing their chance of evaporation) and had to trudge back upstairs to spin it down again before unceremoniously shoving it into the bag and crossing my fingers. 

The vial theoretically contains the PCR products of three genes for over 700 specimens of microgastrines. You can learn what a PCR is here, or what microgastrines are here. It took weeks of lab work to put together - we even got to use some robots to help us!

The robot is transferring our PCR product (which contains many, many copies of a particular gene for each of our specimens) from one purple plate to a second purple plate. By using the robot we saved lots of time, removed the chance of human-error (i.e. me losing concentration and putting samples in the wrong places on the plate) and saved our arms from getting a repetitive strain injury.

The sequencing company will take our little vial and run it through a machine called the Illumina Miseq to enable us to learn the genetic code for each of the samples - it is a pretty cool process that we will try and explain in a future blog! In the meantime, cross your fingers for us as we wait not-so-patiently for our results! 

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This week we're in Melbourne! As well as eating crazy donuts and liquid nitrogen icecream, we're sorting through specimens at Melbourne museum!

Museum Victoria have done a lot of biological surveys, and lots of this material might have specimens of our wasps in it that would be useful for our DNA project. So we're slowly sorting through it and borrowing the things we find.

Getting to visit most of the museums in Australia has definitely been a highlight of this PhD, and is one of the awesome parts of being a scientist - we're able to travel and see so much of Australia and the world!

Last week, Mustard and I spent some time at The Australian National Insect Collection (ANIC) in Canberra. The collection is a really important resource for scientists, who are able to access specimens for their research. We spent the week hunting through the Hymenoptera (wasps, sawflies, bees and ants) ethanol collection, as we were after specimens of our group of wasps, the microgastrines. 

It was lovely to meet the scientists who work at ANIC and get to visit such a huge collection of insects! We found over 200 specimens of out wasps, so the next step is to see if we can get DNA out of them! 

Check out the youtube video below to learn more about the National Insect Collection.

You might remember a couple of weeks ago we set up some malaise traps for catching wasps. Two weeks later we went to see what we'd found! Mustard and I spent hours and hours at the microscope sorting through a lot of insects. We weren't very successful at catching many of the microgastrine wasps that we're studying, but we did find one specimen right at the end of the third bottle! 

Although we didn't find many of our wasps, we did find some pretty awesome wasps that we wanted to share with you! These guys below are in the family Chrysididae and are parasitoids or cleptoparasitoids of other wasps or bees. Head to our citizen science website to learn about parasitoids. Cleptoparasitic wasps such the Chrysididae lay their eggs inside the nests of unrelated wasps or bees, where the baby Chrysidids eat the host young and the food the host provided for them. They are iridescent due to the structural surface of their exoskeleton... and super pretty!

The true bug (Hemiptera) below is super weird and super awesome. We're not entirely sure what family it is from - do you know? Let us know in the comments!

Mustard and I hope that you had a great Christmas and New Year -  we certainly did!

We're back in the lab, sorting some more wasp specimens. Today we also sent a bunch of PCR samples to the Australian Genome Research Facility for sequencing.

Some of these samples include DNA we extracted from wasps that were sent to us by a citizen scientist! Head here to learn about our citizen science project, The Caterpillar Conundrum!

You can also check out how we extract the DNA, and how we run a PCR!

The last couple of weeks have been full of exciting stuff - lab work! We'll take you through what we're doing in the lab step-by-step very soon, but today Mustard just wanted to share a photo of him taking notes in our lab book.

Scientists need to keep very careful notes about what they do in the lab. This is firstly just for themselves - it's hard to remember exactly what protocol or procedure you did last week, let along three years down the track. Secondly, when you publish your results in a scientific journal, you need to write in the methods - which means you need to keep a good record of what you did! Thirdly, if another scientist tries to replicate your results and fails, having detailed notes about all the different successes and failures you had in the lab along the way can help sort out what's going on. 

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Sorry we've been so quiet for so long! It's been busy and hectic in the PhD world the last few weeks - but Mustard's here to fill you in on what we've been up to!

We went to some bioinformatic workshops, including learning how to talk to the computer in scripting language. Bioinformatics is a combination of computer science and statistics focussed on understanding and analysing huge amounts of biological data, like genetic sequences. It's a booming field because lab scientists (like me!) are generating huge amounts of genetic data that they don't know how to deal with. Bioinformaticians work out how to process the data and turn it into something usable. 

We also gave a talk at our weekly lab group meeting on our project, as a practice for the presentation we need to give at the University as part of our PhD program, and also for a conference in December. 

We also took a week off to deliver science holiday workshops at the South Australian Museum as part of their Opals exhibition. The opals exhibition is pretty awesome, so you should definitely check it out if you're in Adelaide!

Meanwhile, we've been doing lots of work at the microscope, and are getting pretty good at identifying the wasps!

Today we helped another lab member pick up some ethanol for a field trip. 100% ethanol is used for storing insect specimens, as it stops the DNA in the cells of the insect from breaking down. We need to keep the DNA in good condition so that we can extract it and sequence it, to eventually use it to determine how the different insect specimens are related to each other... but more on that later in the project! 

By using 100% ethanol and storing the insect specimens in the fridge, we can keep the DNA usable for years. Because older collections are often all pinned, or their specimens are in formalin (which makes the DNA unusable) or 70% ethanol (which contains water that breaks down the DNA), our project will need some fresh specimens stored in 100% ethanol to be able to do any work on the DNA. 

Today we learnt where to pick up ethanol from in the University, which will be handy when we go on our own field trip in Summer! 

Checking out more wasps today! We haven't collected any wasps ourselves yet, but there are plenty in the collection of the University that we're using to learn how to identify different species.

Insect specimens can last a really long time when they are looked after. The oldest wasp specimens we looked at today were only from the 1980s, but the oldest pinned specimen in the world is a butterfly (Pontia daplidice) in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History from 1702! That means it is 313 years old!

To allow insect specimens to last this long, they have to be cared for and kept in a special way. First of all, our wasps are sorted according to their species in these little white boxes. This makes it easy to find what you are looking for! 

These little boxes are then placed in a collection drawer. The collection drawers protect the specimens from having anything dropped on them. The drawers also contain naphthalene, a chemical which protects the specimens from living insects that would want to eat them! If you've ever used moth balls to protect your linen from being nibbled on by moths, they were traditionally made of the same chemical. 

The labelled drawers then go into a labelled cabinet, which keeps the drawers organised and out of direct sunlight, which can fade or damage specimens. The cabinets are kept in a cool room to help preserve the specimens. 

For a great summary on the reasons entomologists need to kill some insects and have dead specimens for study, check out this post on the Ask and Entomologist blog. 

Maybe the wasps that Mustard and I collect will last for 313 years too!