Blog Post by Sarah Moser, Bosque School Alumna and Delaney Hill, Amy Biehl Charter High School Alumna

We are two recent high school graduates working as interns in the BEMP program. Delaney went to Amy Biehl Charter High School, and will be attending UNM this fall. Sarah graduated from Bosque School, and will be going to Bard College in New York State. Since the summer of last year, we have been working on a project focused on the study of North American porcupines that inhabit the Bosque Riparian forest. They are somewhat mysterious animals in that they have not actually been studied very much, at least genetically. A solid way to keep track of their populations and life cycles has not been established. We wanted to open up a door to this type of research on them.

Sarah working on DNA samples

We began work by extracting DNA from porcupine quills that the BEMP program has been collecting since 2003, then amplified it using PCR, and ran several gel electrophoresis procedures to confirm its size and viability. Then we continued to work with and analyze it, and came up with some interesting preliminary results. We constructed a mini phylogenetic tree to illustrate how the samples were related, and in February, we attended the Joint Annual Meeting of the Arizona/New Mexico Fishery and Wildlife Societies in Farmington, NM, and presented a poster on our methods and those initial results.

Currently, we are conducting lab work at the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe with the help of Callum Bell, doing PCR for mitochondrial d-loop sequencing. We are taking the data collected from these procedures and using a program to determine how many base pairs of DNA we have for each sample, which helps us determine information needed for the next step in our lab work. We are also beginning to research and write a formal paper for this project, which we hope to be able to publish.

We received an amazing amount of help from BEMP superstar Katie Elder. She has supported us throughout the project, and now in the last stages of our fieldwork and the bulk of our work on the paper, she continues to supervise and assist. A UNM graduate student, Miriam Hutchinson, also helped us with beginning research, taught us skills for working in a lab environment, and helped us with our DNA extractions and PCR. She also continues to offer support and lots of brainpower for our project.

Delaney pretends to be an evil scientist

Delaney is passionate about the work that we have been doing and the work in the future. She finds it fascinating and complicated scientific work, and wants to pursue this field of study as a profession in the future. 

Sarah is also hoping to pursue genetic research as a career, and is very grateful for the experiences and opportunities this project has provided. She loves science, and wishes the whole world felt the same way!