EcoEvoDevo Lab

The Angelini lab group at Colby College.

• Current Lab Goals
• Reading List

Standard operating procedures (SOPs)

• General Info for Students in the Lab (including how to get involved and lab safety)

Field biology

• Field work along rural road sides
• Field work on Maine islands
• Insect Macro Photography
• A Guide to Bumble Bee Species of Maine

Entomology

• Photographing butterflies in the lab
• Bumble bee anatomy and measurement protocols for
  • mouthparts
  • legs
  • wings (landmarks)
• Staining insects for micro-CT scanning
• Micro-CT scanning

Molecular biology

• Autoclave
• DNA extraction using the Maxwell 16 for large, soft samples
• DNA extraction using Qiagen DNeasy Kit (e.g. for beetles)
• Extraction of high-molecular weight (HMW) DNA
• RNA extraction
• cDNA synthesis
• PCR
• Agarose gel electrophoresis
• RNA synthesis for RNAi and CRISPR
• In vitro digestion of DNA with sgRNA/Cas9
• Realtime PCR
• Miscellaneous Molecular Biology Methods

Developmental biology

• Rearing flour beetle stocks
• Rearing Oncopeltus fasicatus, milkweed bugs
• Rearing Jadera ssp., soapberry bugs
• Rearing Vanessa cardui, painted lady butterflies
• Measuring mass muscle
• Microinjection
• Photomicrography

Computational biology

• Intro to R
• Basic Statistics
• Geometric morphometrics - updated borealis vigenette coming soon!
• Linux basics - A quick introduction of the bash command line
• Local BLAST - How to run BLAST in the command line, using custom local databases.
• GenBank submission for batch sequences
• Microbiome Analysis Tutorial

Project workflows

Completed

• morphDE: Repository for the differential expression analysis for Jadera haematoloma by morph and other factors (Angelini et al. 2022 ICB)
• bombus.landscape: Bombus landscape microbiome analysis (Young et al. 2023 bioRxiv)
• Qiime2 Classifier Update: Adding SSU rRNA sequences relevant to bumble bees to the SILVA release 132 NR99 dataset

In progress

• BeeSeq - Neonic effects on Bombus impatiens gene expression and microbiome (2021 Update)
• Cownose ray feeding ecology: Using microbiome analysis to determine the prey and microbiota of Rhinoptera bonasus

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