Laundry drama and PCR stress

Last week Becca and I were told that it is totally fine to take several showers during the day, even four showers a day is fine! We took this as a subtle hint, and decided it was time to do laundry. Monday was the chosen day, and without any help we successfully completed all of it! Success! It was raining so we hung all our clothes up in the side room instead of out in the sun. Then it kept raining, and raining, and raining, and raining..... and never stopped. Said clothes began to stink... so much for that.

Wednesday we received new primers and ran a PCR (now that I explained the process a bit I can use all the science jargon I want! ha!). Since we began working in January however, Becca and I have struggled getting PCR to work with Calopterygidae. These new primers were supposed to do the trick, but the gel we ran on Wednesday was a fail. We could barely see anything, and decided to run another gel the next morning. We put the gel in, turned on the UV light and.... nothing. Becca and I scratched our heads a bit and wondered what to do. We finally decided to try again, this time using the shortcuts we'd learned in the US, and it worked!! Finally, we'd gotten some Calopterygidae to work! Friday we ran another PCR with different primers, and it worked too! It's a miracle!



Had a girl's night Tuesday :)



Plants are amazing.



We went collecting with a couple of our lab friends on Wednesday. So beautiful!!! I love exploring here, it so different from anything I have seen before.





Bamboo!





Lovely Becca hard at work in the lab.



Look! There are definitely bars on there! The big ones are primer dimers, but if you look really closely, there are definitely faint bars everywhere we didn't have a blank :) (And if you're going cross-eyed trying to see, don't worry, I understand)



Juice from sugarcane! Not nearly as sweet as I thought it would be.



This is what chocolate comes from. I'm dying to try it, even though everyone says the fruit doesn't taste super good.

Today Becca and I are leaving Assis :( We'll be coming back though, and I'm excited to see what a new city brings!

Lots of food and some new friends.

Unesp (the University we work at) has an abundance of trees, one of which is a guava tree! I've never actually eaten a guava before, but they are delicious. 

We decided to have avocado and bread for lunch and ate it in the lab. Everyone thought it was crazy weird. Avocado's are apparently only eaten sweet here? Odd, I konw. We tried eating the other half of the avocado with sugar to see if we liked it.... not so much. Gesa made us mashed avocado with lemon and sugar though, that was good. 

Our lab friends!! Well, two of them. Lucas trained us in the lab, and we've extracted DNA with Thiago. 

Brazilian hot dogs are HUGE!! Really though, this thing had TWO hot dogs in it, and bacon, and mini fries on top, and a ton of other miscellaneous stuff in between. After four bites I was full. 

The first Mai Thai lesson is free, so we tried it! Gave us a good workout which was nice, but a little odd. 

Elena! We got to spend an afternoon swimming with her and her family. 

Simone took us out to dinner, it was sooo good! Beans and rice, of course, as well as several different kinds of meat, and this yummy vegetable salad. I had tangerine juice and it was incredible. Probably my favorite juice so far, which I was not expecting. Tastes way different from tangerines in the US. 

After church Geza taught us how to make brigadeiros! Super easy, and delicious. The plate was full once upon a time.... 

We've been working pretty hard to learn Portuguese (helped by Geza who used to teach Portuguese, and is very patient with us).  When driving to get hot dogs she taught us parallelepipido, sorry if that is horribly misspelled. 

Never take me fishing.

As I'm sure most of you know, I love the outdoors, I love water, and I love fish (eating them especially). Fishing combines all of that, right? So I should enjoy it, and maybe even be partly decent at it, right? Well, every time I go I forget just how bad I really am. Last week they caught over 90 fish, but at least while we were there we caught.... none! Zip! So yeah, don't take me fishing. I'm bad luck AND I'm bad at it ;)

So first we threw out a net (by we I mean not me...) and caught a bunch of little fish that we used as bait later. 

It is soo pretty here!

On the dock ;)

They were kind enough to let me stay in the shade, maybe that's why I didn't catch anything. 

Took a boat ride.

A few of our new friends who spoke English, that was exiting!

There was a large cow head, and everyone thought it was so funny to take pictures in front of it. 

Kind of looks like it's eating my head?

After our day of hard work we drove through a town colonized by Italians. 

And of course, in said town we bought ice cream. 

I got a raisin flavored scoop and condensed milk and coconut. Raisin was ok... but the coconut. Way good. 

The night before we went to a party with some of their friends and stayed up way to late eating waaaaaaay too much food. That combined with an extraordinarily warm night led to very little sleep, and my Portuguese abilities suffered accordingly. I have a weird habit, I used to think out phrases in German, now I try to come up with phrases in Portuguese, and then my brain automatically switches back to German. When I'm tired I get so focused on thinking in Portuguese/German I have a hard time following the conversation well enough to say the things I'm thinking. 

What I am doing in Brazil!

I realized that many of you don't really know why I am here. Makes sense because sometimes I ask myself the same question. Next year I'm planning on applying for graduate school's, and I cannot decide which area I want to focus on, currently the debate is between something to do with plants (most likely ecology or development.... or conservation...) or something to do with insects (ecology, phylogenetics....). Not very narrowed down, I know.

Dr. Bybee was offering a study abroad/internship in Brazil for two students to study a specific genus of damselflies, Hetaerina. (An easy way to tell dragonflies and damselflies apart is their size, damselflies are skinnier). That sounded like a great opportunity to learn how much I enjoy working with insects, and explore a part of the world I never had before. So here I am!



This is a ruby spotted damselfly in the genus hetaerina, so you can see how beautiful they are. Eventually Becca and I will collect several specimens of hetaerina and extract their DNA. If we have time we will run PCR's looking for a specific gene in their mitochondrion. PCR amplifies specific genes, and with that amplification we can compare the difference among individuals and among species. This can be used in creating phylogenetic trees, but there are many other uses.



When Becca and I went collecting last week we caught a few dragonflies, but mostly mnesaretes, which are closely related to hetaerina. Right now Becca and I are making sure the protocol works so when we do collect hetaerina we will be able to successfully perform a PCR. It can be tricky figuring out the right primers (because they have to match with the DNA of the specimen) and the temperature, as different species and different primers work better with different temperatures.

That might have been boring for most of you, but I love this stuff :) If you find it at all interesting, you should read this paper: http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S1519-566X2011000100011&script=sci_arttext&tlng=pt

Rhainer was an author on it, and he is the reason we are here in Brazil!

The beginning

Two weeks into the adventure, and a lack of wi-fi has equaled a lack of blogging. Good excuse anyway J

February 4 we took a flight from SLC to Florida, then Florida to Belo Horizontes, and Belo Horizontes to Viracopos. I had a bit of a heart attack when we first arrived at Brazil, they looked at my Swiss passport for what felt like an eternity before they let us in. It worked though!

It is incredibly warm and humid here, and my hair is doing very Samwise-like things by having a curly heyday. We’ve eaten all sorts of fun food and provided entertainment for every Portuguese speaker we meet (which is everyone) as well as successfully PCRed 7 of our 14 samples! I’d call it a success! Here are some pictures to prove it.

Sunrise over Brazil as we first arrived.

We had a five hour bus ride to Assis - with views like this the whole way I didn't mind ;)

Ricardo's wonderful mother who has taken us in... she's become a second mom :)

Becca and I wandered around the city for a couple hours one afternoon and found this gorgeous cathedral!

Beautiful flowers are everywhere. 

Another thing to remember about Brazil is that the weather is very unpredictable.... on that long walk I mentioned Becs and I got caught in the rain. Streets turn to rivers pretty quick here! 

There are DOZENS of cats on the Unesp campus. Weird. Locos gatos....

An action shot of our collecting trip.

Ricardo's house has this incredible roof, we would sit and play the Ukulele while looking over Assis. 

Iara took us to the market and we tried on traditional Brazilian hats. Also ate Crepe de Suis - but they are definitely not Swiss! They are on a stick, I got the Romeo and Juliet flavor (cheese and jam) super super good.

Cucumbers! Crazy!

Lots of super cool plants :)

We learned how to wash clothes the Brazilian way!

The people here are amazing. I don’t know if they are this friendly, giving and patient to everyone they meet, or if there is something helpless in Becca and I’s lack of Portuguese, or if we are really good at smiling, but we have had so many people here help us to learn the language, feed us, give us rides, introduce us to the city, train us in lab protocol… today for example, we were walking home when the professor of the lab we work at drove by, saw us and offered us a ride. I don’t know how I can ever pay them back for the experience they are giving me.

I have only one complaint so far. Running. I’m having withdrawals. I’m also scared of dogs biting me though, so I don’t see anything changing any time soon.

Also, bananas, mangos, oranges, guava, jabuticaba, passion fruit... all much, much better here. And their juice, it's to die for! I think my favorite food so far is Mangaca, a little like a potato but so, so good. And last night I tried tangerine juice, it was incredible. 

Things are great, adventure is going swell, and I still don't have zika, yellow fever, malaria, or dengue. Tchau!