My collecting trip to Oregon
The week of Oct. 6th, my amazing field assistant/boyfriend Derek and I drove from SLC, where we are biology graduate students, to Oregon, my home state. This season has been exceptional for mushrooming on the west coast and I'd been watching on Facebook with envy for months. My aim for this week-long trip was to collect lobster mushrooms, unparasitized Russula brevipes , and whatever else caught my eye. These samples were dried in a food dehydrator we brought along. I also collected soil samples from beneath lobster mushrooms as well as fresh lobster mushroom tissue preserved in a buffer that should enable me to analyze RNA and metabarcoding data. RNA is the molecule that's created when a gene is "read", or expressed. If a gene is being used, its RNA transcript will be produced and can be detected and analyzed. This lets us know what an organism is "up to" and what kind of physiological activities may be taking place as a response to its environment. Metabar...