Week 10

Welcome!

 
This week was a pretty cool one! 

We started out the week by analyzing our data from the LPA IHC test that we run for the large part of last week. To analyze the slides we had tested, we looked at them using a Compound Microscope. However, the data was pretty horrible. The contrast on the slides was minimal, the background was too prominent, and the overall quality was dismal at best. That definitely was difficult, because we had put so much time and effort into working on those slides. But we did get some good time to trouble shoot what could have gone wrong and how we could fix them for the next time we run this test. 


The rest of the week was pretty video-heavy. Since I don't have a ton of time left here in the lab, I have been working almost exclusively on scoring the behaviors so that data can be recorded and saved for later analysis by Bret and whoever else will be taking over some part of this study. As I said last week, the Day 7 data is very peculiar in that aggression at the "lower levels" primarily posturing and scuffling is drastically reduced while the levels of biting increased significantly. Other than that, the data looks as if they have followed the patterns in Day 1 and Day 2. For example, Cage 1, a cage without the prototype is much more aggressive than Cage 3, in all days of recording. 

We finished off the week by working on a little bit of a side project. The basis for all of the advanced, complicated research so many of us are working on are in basic science that is introduced to kids at young ages. So this week, Bret and I contributed to the spread of basic science a little bit by staining some practice rat and mice brains to be used by high school students who don't have access to slides in school. I got the chance to learn Hematoxylin-Eosin Staining, which was really cool! A much simpler and quicker process that the some of the other IHC stains we had conducted previously, these slides stained bright pink and were awesome to work with.

Completed H&E stain on a Mouse Brain

And that was my week! Thanks for reading!
Tasha

Week 9

It’s already week 9! Welcome back to my blog!

This week I continued watching videos for Day 7 in cages 1, 3 and 5 and have made my way through a good chunk of that footage already. Although I have not finished analyzing the data and comparing it to the Day 1 and Day 2 data from the same cages, I did note one weird aspect in Day 7's behavior. Unlike in Days 1 and 2, where the majority of aggressive behaviors fell under the umbrella of posturing and scuffling, in the Day 7 videos, the majority of recorded behaviors so far are biting. I believe this is due to the fact that the mice have already set up an existing hierarchy in which the dominant mouse bites the others to "remind" them of who's in charge. This is very different from the subtle aggression that we were accustomed to seeing while the mice were still creating their cage hierarchies. But I will update next week depending on what the rest of Day 7 data shows!

One of the coolest things I did this week was the LPA Immunohistochemistry test I ran with Bret over the last three days! An extremely involved staining process, the LPA IHC test spans over nearly five days and requires time and humidity sensitive steps that must be done with extreme attention to detail. 

We decided to run a LPA IHC based on a very specific procedure and ran an optimization test to determine the best concentrations of blocking (base) solutions to use to hopefully increase the contrast and quality in the traumatic brain injury fresh frozen brain tissue. 

The tissue that we are examining belongs to two different animals, one that was injured as a part of a traumatic brain injury (TBI) test and the other that is a sham animal. A sham animal is one that receives surgery and treatment that the injured animal receives without actually being injured. The purpose of the sham animal is to isolate the effects of the injury in the TBI animal by using the sham as a control for the effects of the surgery and/or treatment. Both brains were fresh frozen, which means they were not treated with paraformaldehyde after being extracted and can begin to decay when they are allowed to thaw. 
 
Although I am not an expert in this technique yet, it was very interesting and different from most of the work I have done in the lab so far. Although I worked alongside Bret for the majority of the steps, I mixed and applied the control primary antibody solution while Bret completed the primary antibody application and completed the majority of the rinse and drying steps by myself.

Because of the nature of the drying process of these slides, the results of our stain won’t be available until early next week, but I’ll be sure to include the results and pictures of the slides we stained in my Week 10 blog! 

Thanks for reading!

Tasha

Week 8

Here's a little bit about my week:

This week was a little calmer compared to last week. I got further into the Day 7 footage, which has some very interesting trends that I will share in next week’s post once they are more apparent.

I also assisted in a surgery in the vivarium as a scribe for another researcher. Although I am not familiar with the specifics about the project, the surgery was very interesting to watch and I was able to take a small role in helping things run smoothly in the surgery suite which was very rewarding. 

Before I sign off for this week, I wanted to mention some other interesting things about our project:

The cages that have the enrichment devices in them are not yet scored for behavior because of a much more involved process needed to complete viewing their footage. As we want to measure a larger number of things, it helps to have more than one pair of eyes on the video at a time, so we have only gotten through a few hours so far, with the assistance of other interns in the lab. In the divided cages we are looking at the amounts of aggressive behaviors exhibited by the mice, just like the other cages, but also record the time each mouse spends in the new enrichment area as it compares to the amount of time they choose to spend with each other. This data will hopefully shed some light into the extent of mice social needs. 

Until next week!

Tasha

Week 7

Welcome back!

Week 7 was very exciting! Firstly, our data from the non-divided cages on Day 1 looks just as promising as that from Day 2 and mirrors some significant patterns that seem to show the enrichment devices are actually functioning as intended. 

Rot-A-Rod Machine

Second, BALB/c mice are not very intelligent. We completed three days of Rot-A-Rod testing with them this week to very poor results from all groups leading us to believe that this strain of mice simply doesn’t perform as well as others in this type of cognitive test. So what is a Rot-A-Rod test? The Rot-A-Rod performance test is a performance test based on a rotating rod with forced motor activity being applied, usually by a rodent. The test measures parameters such as riding time (seconds) or endurance. Some of the functions of the test include evaluating balance, grip strength and motor coordination of the subjects; especially in testing the effect of experimental drugs or after traumatic brain injury. Although the test didn’t achieve much, in terms of our devices, they don’t seem to have hurt performance on the test or help it significantly.  The test itself was very interesting to run and I had a lot of fun learning how to do it! 

And then it was back to video, for the rest of the week, I started collecting data from the first few clips of Day 7 data!

Thanks!

Tasha