Thing that happened to me today #2

Everybody's work sucks sometimes, yesterday mine was atrocious.

So I am studying Plant Pathology at the UMN. I work with barley, specifically on genetic resistance to diseases of it. In order for us to determine which lines of barley have resistance to disease, we have to make them sick on purpose. Summertime is field season, and we have huge fields of barley growing, usually with thousands of lines spread out in dashes along the rows in the field. Now, the easy way to inoculate a field of barley with, for instance, a fungal pathogen, is to spray a suspension of those fungal spores all over the field and let them do their thing. Sometimes, however, the conditions are not right for disease, it is too dry out and the spores just dry out before that can germinate and infect. So my adviser came up with an alternative method. He decided it would be best if we injected the spore suspension directly into the stems of the barley plants. Thats right, walk the fields with a repeating syringe injecting plants, THOUSANDS of them. So yesterday I walked the length of say, a football field, bending all the way over to about a foot off the ground, injecting a plant, moving one foot further down the row, bend over again, repeat, one foot, repeat, etc. I did this for the length of the field, then back again, then halfway back again the way I started. Luckily there was a lot of us doing it and it wasn't too hot out. It still sucked and needless to say, I have a bit of back pain today.

Can't wait until next week when I have to go to every single line and read the level of disease.