My own mosquitoes!

This week I was given my own transgenic line of mosquitoes. I raised them and put them into cages based on the presence of the transgene VgMryAsAkt in their genome. The females and males were sorted into seperate cages as well. They were bloodfed and then put into even smaller containers. The bloodfed, transgeneic, female mosquitoes are placed in different cages with different "post bloodmeal" times labled on the cages. We want to do experiments on how the transgene effects the reproductive capability of the mosquitoes; thus we do dissections at different times after the bloodmeal to test the different tissues for the activity rates of different proteins.

I've also been doing insectery work such as counting eggs, setting up cages, and organizing the mosquitoes.

Now that I have all the techniques down I am ready to start actually collecting data that can be used in the lab. For the next few weeks I'll be dissecting tissues, preping RNA from the tissues, making cDNA from the RNA, running PCR, and finally running gels to see what effects the transgene has on the mosquito.