This was my first ever summer internship working at the Cranberry Research Station in
Wareham, Massachusetts. This station is affiliated with UMass Amherst, which is how I, as a
rising sophomore at UMass Amherst, found out about it.
I’ve had the pleasure of working on a variety of different tasks at the Cranberry Research
Station, which included some field work and a lot of lab work, which was located directly at the
station.
An example of field work that I helped with was helping with an experiment. This particular
experiment basically is shading cranberries to see what impacts (good or bad) it would have on
them. To do this, We built a sizable tent-like structure on a random section of the cranberry bog.
Some of the things that I did in the Lab were…
- Electrophoresis
- Culturing Fungi
- DNA Extraction
Electrophoresis is basically a technique used to separate DNA molecules based on their size
and electrical charge.
Culturing Fungi is basically when you transfer a section of a fungus from where it originally
was to a new and clean plate to see how it grows overtime. It can help you identify what the
fungi is and it can also be a good way to see if there is an infection with the fungi or not.
DNA Extraction is basically a method to purify DNA either by using physical or chemical
methods from a sample separating DNA from cell membranes, proteins and other cellular
components.
These 3 things are all very complex in their own ways. This is because if you make even one
small mistake, then that will very likely throw off the entire procedure and you have to restart it,
especially with Electrophoresis and DNA Extraction.
