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Wolbachia Research Paper

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Wolbachia is a bacterium, which infects nematodes and insects, spiders, and crustaceans, which are considered arthropods. Although Wolbachia is known to be present within up to 75 % of insect species, the disease cannot be transmitted to humans or to animals. To have the help of qualified and intelligent scientist, Armstrong students is participating in this project to give other scientist a helping hand. Students of Armstrong help scientist determine the extent of Wolbachia because many strains of Wolbachia exist within the insect population. The order of my insect was Psocoptera. Psocoptera is a unique insect because I found an insect that was not listed in the key used to determine the order of insects found in Savannah. The common names of Psocoptera are psocids, barklice or booklice. Psocoptera generally lives in moist environments beneath stones, under the bark of trees, and plant litter, which are leaves that have fallen from the ground. They feed on plants, fungi and debris. Throughout their life cycle, Psocoptera goes through metamorphosis including egg and larval stages before becoming adults. According to a peer …show more content…

The scientific process that we used was first defining the problem in order to move on to the next step. Meaning what is Wolbachia? We had to identify our insect using a key used to find the order of the insects in Savannah. We eventually learned how to determine the concentration of DNA and protein in a aqueous solution. Using our solution we did DNA extraction and quantification using our solution from our previous steps. We used elution, salt, lysis and wash buffer along with EtOH and proteinase K. After completing DNA extraction and quantification we did our PCR samples were we used a positive and negative control, no template control and our samples. Lastly we did our gel electrophoresis where we found whether our insect was positive or negative for

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