Collecting blood

Last time we talked about our most important collaborators, the Gila monsters (you can read that here). 

I'm excited to share some pictures of the blood they've kindly donated to our efforts to learn more about their genome. 

Here is a picture immediately after we collected blood samples from three males and three females, and just before they went into the deep freezer (-80C): 

 

Don't worry, those aren't full! Each one of those is a glass tube (a vacutainer) with EDTA (Ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid) in it. EDTA acts as an anticoagulant, to prevent the blood from clotting, which helps make DNA extraction easier. 

We take about 1mL of blood from each animal using a 1mL syringe, like this one: 

 

For reference of how much that actually is, one cup has 240mL in it, and one teaspoon has about 5mL. We collect, at most, 1mL from each individual (so, about 1/5 of a teaspoon).

DNA will be extracted from each of these samples, and then sequenced. We'll talk about the next steps soon!