New Beginings!

It’s been a while since I wrote a post, but everything suddenly got very busy after I (finally) accepted a PhD position!

I officially started my new project two weeks ago, but I did some reading in advance. I’m now based at the Limnology department of one of Austria’s universities which is actually in a small town a fair distance away from the actual uni. The department is right by a beautiful lake and I can get out in the outdoors very easily, hiking and swimming and summer, and hopefully I can go snowboarding in winter! My new lab is rather small, but really wonderful. We all work on different parts of the same project, which is sort of new for me, but so far it’s great.

The view from work.

My PhD plan is yet to be outline in detail, but I know what I need to do in the next few months. There is a conference at the end of August that I will be attending (so soon!), and my supervisor even encouraged me to submit an abstract for a poster, so I have been, and will continue to work pretty hard in the lab until the conference, and even afterwards in the hope of submitting a small paper to the conference proceedings. All very ambitious plans, but the lab work is fairly straight-forward, I am currently optimising a karyotyping protocol, and hopefull that gets ironed out soon. I have some nice stainings so far, but it’s still proving difficult to actually count the chromosmes.

Taken with my phone down the microscope, this is the nicest DAPI staining I’ve had.

I do apologise for the unorganised post, but I just thought I’d get back into writing again!

Let me know if you have any suggestions for how to improve my karyotyping protocol!