Biology megablaster: part 2

We sent Maikani's PCR products away for sequencing and anxiously awaited the results. The sequencing company we send our samples to is in Massachusetts, so it only takes a few days to get data back. Given how clean Maikani's PCRs were, I had high hopes for the sequences.

An adorable coral spat on a tile. Thanks to genetics, I now 
know this is a Pocillopora recruit.

And oh, were my dreams fulfilled! Her sequences came back super clean - and easy to interpret, too. One by one, I compared Maikani's sequences to the online database GenBank. One by one, the search results came back with logical, reasonable answers. Some sequences even had a 100% match to a species in the database. I was overjoyed. 

Given how well Maikani's sequences BLASTed (yes, the acronym for a simple database-matching algorithm is BLAST), I decided to revisit my 2018 coral spat sequences, some of which had given me rather confusing results. My molecular biology skills have significantly improved in the last few years, so I thought maybe I could get better, more reliable identifications with a re-analysis of the data. 

Long story short, I did. We now have a trustworthy dataset of coral recruitment at our study sites across Palau. The data we collected from the newly-settled recruits (sometimes called "coral spat") will be combined with all the photos we took of juveniles on the reefs and compared to the adults. By the time we're finished, we'll be able to tell how similar the adults, juvenile, and recruit species compositions are at each site and by extension, the level of connectivity for coral reefs across Palau. 

I love watching data come together and show something important! It's an exciting time for the project!