Sample information

Lanternfly has black spots on its wings (looks like ink spatters); ends of wings have small, black pinpricks on its wings; folded black legs; black body; abdomen is shiny and black-and-white striped; underside of wings is darkish but bright red; small, black head

The lanterfly was found by another student (not myself) outside of my school doors on the pavement. The bug was found in early fall and the temperature was 21.1º C.

Methods

DNA extraction: I dissected the lanternfly’s abdomen, extracted its dna, and macerated it (excluding exoskeleton). Unfortunately, I did not macerate the abdomen extract for long enough in the cell lysis buffer, resulting in a lower concentration of DNA.

Gel electrophoresis lanes are as follows:

1. DNA ladder 1
2. My lab partner’s lanternfly tested for C01 arthropod gene
3. My lanternfly tested for C01 arthropod gene
4. break
5. My lab partner’s lanternfly tested for wolbachia gene
6. My lanternfly tested for wolbachia gene
7. DNA ladder 2

Analysis: No controls were used in this experiment due time restrictions. Faint bands are present at the arthropod and wolbachia bp location.

Sequencing: Both arthropod and wolbachia samples from my bug were sequenced, but both had very low quality (overall Q value was 19). Nonetheless, when I “blastn” and “blastx” the sequences, they matched to the corresponding arthropod and a wolbachia dna.

Results

Despite the faint wolbachia band on the gel electrophoresis for my ant and the low-quality wolbachia sequence, I am highly confident that my bug has wolbachia because the blastn and blastx results demonstrated that I did in fact extract wolbachia dna from my lanternfly. I don’t have controls to compare my gel electrophoresis results to, but like I said, the blastn and blastx results make me confident in my results.