Week 1


Hello! I just wanted to give an update on my project.

Everything has been going great in the lab. Yesterday I sat in on a meeting that summarized the research the lab has been doing recently. To give a very brief summary, the lab "knocked out" a specific gene in mice, and used these "knock out" mice as a model for schizophrenia. They found these knock out mice were hyper-aggressive and seemed to adjust poorly to novel environments. Now, they are trying to see if they can use viruses to change genes in the knock out mice in order to reduce their symptoms.

Today I got a tour of the lab, and safety training. I was also taught how to use their pipettes. Finally, I got to see a mouse brain get sliced into thin pieces that can then be mounted on a slide to be examined under a microscope. I never realized about how small mouse brains are; they are really tiny, but you can still make out the different lobes and features like the corpus callosum. These thin slices are made with a machine that cools the brain and then moves it up and down against a blade (kind of like a deli slicer for meat).

Anyway, I just wanted to give an update, and let you know I might change my project topic slightly this week based on what I am specifically doing in the lab.

Thanks for reading!
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Hope everyone is having a nice Friday! 

On Wednesday, I was trained on how to image the slices of mouse brain. Basically I am putting the slides with mouse brain slices under a microscope that shines a special light on it to make the spots that were stained fluoresce, then I am using a computer program to select each hemisphere of the brain so the camera attached to the microscope can take pictures of it. Or in other words I am sitting in a small room in the dark staring at pictures of mouse brains. I know that sounds incredibly boring, but it is actually really cool, because I can see lots of details, like the neurons that absorbed the fluorescent dye. I am taking these images at 10x, and at that power the neurons look like little green dots (everything is green because of the staining and fluorescent light), and sometimes you can even see the dendrites that look like tiny lines coming off them.

Enjoy your weekends!