Welcome to my world

Since returning from Lugano, I have immersed myself in the lab monotony I call my life. Well it isn’t that bad I guess. I am enjoying the productivity. I have 5 multiplexes of msat primers to run on all my samples and I am just about done with the first one and started the second today. Each one should take less than a week if no problems arise. Then Filipe gets back on the 3rd and I will start analyzing the data under his advise, getting as much done as possible before the end of September. Oh yeah, did I tell you? I am staying a few weeks extra, cutting my stay on the EC short. This may also allow me to squeeze in some more traveling in Europe (my new favorite tract of land – yeah, I think I love the whole damn thing, well maybe save certain eating establishments in Spain).

Anyway, this is what I have been doing the past two straight days:

It’s a chromatogram of 5 dna loci (locations along the genome) for one individual I collected in 2006. I have 200 individuals so I will have 5 pictures like this for each individual to analyze. It could be much worse actually, I have fewer samples than most geneticists I know. The different colors are the loci and there are either 1 or 2 peaks for that loci depending on if the individual is heterozygous or homozygous. I chose this one because it is really clean and very clearly shows this individual is heterozygous for 4 of the loci since you can see two red peaks, two blue peaks and so on. That means its parents were different from each other for those loci, got it? Sorry, but you have to suffer too…just a bit.

I have been having some fun too though. For instance, yesterday was a Catholic holiday celebrating some assumptions made by the virgin (not sure what assumptions she made, but I am almost positive they had nothing to do with the risk factors involved in using the rhythm method). Anyway, everything was closed in town, presumably so that all religiously minded Portuguese would be able to gather in the north under the pouring rain, singing and waving white handkerchiefs…at least, that is what it looked like on tv. Licinia and I took this chaste opportunity to visit Vila Real de Santo Antonio just on the border of Spain where, at the end of a long winding walk through the pines is a really nice beach. It was the perfect Wednesday. The mega-cool bonus was that Vila Real is probably one of the most pleasant towns I have been in, like a little Lisbon with very old beautiful buildings lining a wide river overlooking Spanish border towns. After the beach we strolled around and then feasted on grilled sardines, which has fast become my staple food item. I am even getting good at filleting them in a way that reduces the number of bones that will line my esophagus for hours.

I think this weekend we will head to Sagres on the southwestern tip of Portugal for some hiking...oh, and there’s that surfing championship happening too. Something to rid my brain of multicolored lines!