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