Tardigrades, also known as water bears, are microscopic aquatic animals that can tolerate a range of extremes that most organisms and the materials they are made of cannot withstand. They live through high and low temperatures, pressure as high as 7.5 GPa, and high doses of radiation. I worked with one water bear species, Hypsibius exemplaris, formerly known as Hypsibius dujardini, which is a model to understand how they and biological structures can survive extremes. I worked in the Goldstein Lab from August 2016 to May 2018 as an independent undergraduate researcher working mainly with fluorescence microscopy and microinjection. I improved the microinjection technique and developed standardized methods for application to transgenics, lineage tracking, and marking cellular components. My protocol has been published in Cold Spring Harbor Protocol , which can be found here.

I spent the summer of 2017 performing intensive research funded through two university grants- the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship and the White Undergraduate Research Fellowship. My grant proposal provides an example of my scientific writing.

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Embryos with Alexa 647 Dextran inside

My updated injection protocol figure

Short GIFs and videos are on YouTube in the links below.

Tardigrade Video with PI labeling nuclei

In addition to my research, I found ways to humor myself.

Tardigrades are notorious for their tun, a cryptobiotic mechanism used to survive extremes. I used Scanning Electron Microscopy to image the tun, and during this process, I took an image of a tardigrade’s claw. I like to think this picture is a tardigrade flicking me off.

I wished the Goldstein lab a happy holidays in festive science terms. This card plays on the traditional Christmas checklist with seltzer water being gifted instead of coal for those who were bad. For tardigrades, seltzer water is a harmless, reversible paralyzer. For those who were good, they received algae.