We went to four different labs at Virginia Tech. The first lab was a tissue culture lab. Tissue culture is done to produce plants much more quickly than seeds. Bananas are a fruit that must be grown through tissue culture because they are sterile. They have done many projects with potatoes and potato genome sequencing. Virginia Tech made the specimen to sequence.
Next we went to the plant pathology lab and got to work through some pathology issues. It was really fun to try to figure out what was wrong with each specimen without very much information about the specimen. Some of the specimens allowed us to run a virus test to see if the problem is possibly a virus.
Then we went to the insect collection and saw A LOT of different insects. There were over 700,000 specimens in the collection. The collection is currently at Price Fork Research Center but is going to be moved to another location soon.
Finally we went to the nematode lab and saw how they separated the nematodes from the soil. They have a semi-automatic elutriator that separates the soil from the nematodes. They also have a desktop version scanning electron microscope that allows them to see the nematodes up close and study them.
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