Alright, at this point, I’ve got a few different projects going. First, I’m examining gene expression within crabs infected with Hematodinium (using Grace Crandall’s samples). Second, I’m working on modeling a few decades of survey data on Hematodinium infection rates from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (I’ve been meaning to write up a lab notebook post on that, will do it soon).
However, recently a third project got added to the pile! During Hack Week, we went into the lab to tidy things up. While there, I found a HUGE number of archived samples that were sent over by Pam Jensen after her retirement. They generally consist of hemolymph samples in deep 96-well plates, and appear to contain samples from both infected and uninfected crabs. Samples date back to the mid-2000s, and there’s literally four large totes full of them.
This is an absolute goldmine of data, and I really really want to do something exciting with it. However, the first step of that is actually determining what the samples are. Here’s a list of all boxes. However, it’s missing a lot of info - which wells map to which crabs? When and where was each crab sampled? Hopefully, those questions can be answered by the data that Pam sent over, particularly the Access databases. My plan is to take the following steps:
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Merge tables in Access databases to map each well to a specific crab with collection and sampling time info. This should give us data through 2013.
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Merge all Excel tables (from 2014-2019) to also map each well to a specific crab, as above.
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See if the two merged tables can also be merged without losing substantial information
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Look at the resulting table(s) to see what interesting questions can be answered with this! I’m particularly angling towards coming up with a GRFP topic - since I’m really the only one with access to these samples, it seems like a pretty appealing project.