Achievement

The second major achievement was the planning and execution of the wet-lab molecular methods and the preparation of DNA for high throughput sequencing libraries. There were a series of lectures by IGERT faculty from Brown and MBL with expertise in molecular biology, computational genomics, next generation sequencing and the background and concepts of these methods. The trainees’ project this year motivated the use of a recently published method for genome scans using restriction associated DNA sequencing. We brought in the author of this paper (Dr. Brant Peterson from Harvard) who described the methods and the computational pipelines associated with analyses. The trainees have different but complementary skills that allowed them to make progress on computational and wet-bench aspects of the research. A large sample of DNA preparations was completed (288 plants from six different salt marshes from Massachusetts to Georgia), which took longer than anticipated.