October 30, 2018 This weekend I stepped away from the computer and stepped into the desert southwest. I have been to the Moab, Utah area many times before. My first trip was sophomore year of college on spring break where I drove to a campground in the dark and woke up with the sun to the most magnificent red rock cliffs I had ever seen. I was stunned by the beauty and have been in awe of that landscape ever since. Spring break every year after that led me back to the Moab region to explore slot canyons, mountain bike, and play. On backpacking trips with my cross-country ski team, we really became familiar with the desert landscape and with the life forms that survive the harsh desert conditions. Frog songs echo from the canyon bottoms at dusk in the spring as hundreds congregate at small pools to mate. Vegetation clings to these same pools, making canyon bottoms and springs incredibly lush. Beyond these transient water supplies, life depends on cryptobiotic soil crusts which are microbial communities that form a “carpet” over the desert sands. The soil crusts hold the soil/sand in place, collect water, and form a solid-nutrient rich structure from which plants can grow. When these crusts are young, they are almost imperceptible. When they are old (hundreds of years), they are highly visible as thick black mats in-between patches of cactus or sagebrush or flat sandstone bedrock. My ski coaches Christi Boggs and Rachel Watson inspired my respect for the soil crusts, showing me how quickly our favorite places might change if we didn’t think carefully about where we walked through the desert. We trained ourselves to place our feet only on existing trails or on solid sandstone, keeping soil crusts intact. And when we’d find a particularly old carpet, we’d all crouch down and appreciate the complexity of microbial colors and shapes growing on its surface. This weekend was my chance to see for the first time the Canyonlands Research Center (CRC), the site for my future work with the Barger Lab. The CRC is located at the historic Dugout Ranch just outside of Canyonlands National Park. I also had a chance to visit the restoration site where different methods are tested for restoring soil crusts on degraded desert lands. Since crusts take a long time to develop and are crucial for the growth of plants in these deserts, it is really important to figure out how to use crusts in restoration projects. Both the CRC and the restoration project site are in an incredibly scenic area that makes me want to sing Taylor Swift’s, “Wildest Dreams”. Lots of cool research happens at the CRC including rangeland monitoring, rain-out shelters simulating reduced precipitation, cottonwood tree genetics, drought experiments, sagebrush stressors, pollinator studies, and lizard responses to climate change. You can learn more at the CRC website if you are interested at https://canyonlandsresearchcenter.org/research/index. The facility itself includes tents, a classroom, and meeting room. Luxury living conditions for field work if you ask me. While the weekend made me pull out the ecology texts and start researching “soil restoration”, Monday refocused me abruptly with a Data Structures homework assignment on deleting a node of a tree. Sounds simple right? Just break off a branch from the tree and that’s it! Nope, coding it was a lot harder than expected. Our cohort also has an Optical Imaging midterm this Friday. So, IQ Biology once again has my focus. I’ll save soil crusts for my wild desert southwest dreams.
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I walk into the IQ Bio room and find evidence of my cohort scattered about. Ten of us, unfamiliar only 9 weeks ago, share this room on the second floor of the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building (JSCBB) at CU Boulder. First, I find Karl's coffee mug at the closest position of the table for quick access. Kathleen's smoothie maker is in the corner of the room at one of the cubicles. Philip's handwriting on the whiteboard answers the question, "What does IQ mean to you? "Intriguing Queen", "Illustrious Quail", "Illuminating Quip", "I'm Qrying". I add, "Iguana Quest" and smile at the word game. The infinity puzzle, given to us by our science communications lecturer, is already complete at the end of the central table. The jargon jar sits empty nearby even though it should be full of dollars for all the times we have used discipline-specific jargon when trying to communicate with one another over the last few weeks.
Yesterday, we all presented on our first rotation projects. Faculty mentors, lab mates, and older IQ students filled the room in support. We each had 10 minutes to share the details of 7 weeks of lab work. Projects ranged widely and made for an interesting 2.5 hours- simulations of partial differential equations that describe diffusion, diverging sunflower types on sand dunes, genetic engineering of fluorescent proteins for neurobiology, methods for compressing large datasets, like human genome data, into manageable sizes. The group was impressive and the power of mentorship filled me with awe once again. As we left the presentations, most of us headed off to meetings with new rotation advisors, starting again the 7-week cycle of learning a whole new field of study. In addition to research, we are all taking gap-filling courses. Generally this means that if you have a computer science background and less biology, you take molecular biology. Or, if you have a biology background, you take a computer science course. Six of us are in an undergraduate level Data Structures course, learning about stacks, queues, and trees for the first time in a language called C++. Learning this language plus the required Optical Imaging course that includes image analysis in MATLAB result in the most hours I have ever spent behind a computer screen. But at least we now know how to write a program that will say "hello world!" like in the movies. If you're thinking about tuning in to this blog, you should expect to find weekly updates on the IQ Biology program, 2018 cohort, and adventures in Boulder. You can expect guest blogs from other IQ students and a random smattering of thoughts regarding graduate school, academia, cool science, and more. Please leave a comment if you have questions you'd like to see answered, and I hope you enjoy learning about the Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology program at the University of Colorado Boulder. |
AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
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