CSI: Gainesville
I have been busy working in a genetics laboratory in Gainesville, Florida. It has been really exciting to work on the analysis of the samples I've collected in Africa over the past 4 years! Although I'm more of an outdoor person (working with delicate glassware and pipetting minuscule quantities into test tubes is not my forte), I'm really enjoying the lab and learning a lot. It will be very interesting to see what knowledge we can gain about West African manatees in different countries and regions across their huge range. Hopefully we'll be able to gain information about whether or not populations are closely related, which can then be used by biologists and managers to address conservation issues.
This is the first time I've done any genetics since the 1980s, so I spent the first week getting up to speed and learning the different techniques needed to analyze manatee tissue and bone samples. I'm very lucky to be working with two manatee genetics experts, Maggie and Bob, from the U.S. Geological Survey. Two other lab workers, Gaia and Teresa, have been wonderful, patient teachers as well!
To start the process, we take a small piece of manatee tissue that has been collected and preserved in the field. Using a very sterile procedure (other DNA, including our own, can easily contaminate the sample), a small piece is cut and put in a vial with a chemical that breaks down the proteins and dissolves the tissue into individual cells. The sample is gently rocked in a warm bath overnight to allow the chemical to break up the tissue...the warm bath part sounded good to me!
Then we add a series of chemicals to isolate the DNA. Some of the chemicals we use are not friendly, so we have to work with our arms inside a fume hood (which has a fan to keep toxic chemicals from bothering us or getting into the lab). It's a bit awkward until you get used to it.
The entire process takes about 12 hours from start to finish. There is lots of room for error and at the end we hope there is some DNA in our vials! It's definitely not as easy as it looks on CSI.
Along the way we transfer the sample into many different vials, all of which need to be labeled with the correct ID number. It's a lot like cooking. You follow the recipe, but because of the quality of the ingredients, things don't always turn out the same way. Much of the manatee tissue I have is from carcasses that were badly decomposed or from hunters who cooked the manatee meat. All of which degrades the DNA. So I've had a few samples fail, but most are yielding something, and Maggie is helping me tweak the techniques to have the best possibility of getting DNA out of less than ideal samples.
Samples that have DNA are sequenced at the University of Florida, so we'll see what results I get! I have over 200 samples from 10 countries so far, and this is just the beginning. I've only run the first 10 samples so I have a long way to go!
Reporting from Florida, Wildlife Trust research scientist Lucy Keith is working on an extensive collaborative project to study West African manatees.
