Week 7

I finished the cell counting this Monday, and we also had a lab meeting. I took off Tuesday because the axel on my car was broken and I had to take it into the shop so I couldn't drive to work. Today it is Wednesday and I am back in the lab.

Tomorrow I will go to Sonora Quest Lab to see if I have been immunized to Hepatitis B. This is required of all UA employees who could potentially be handling blood, because they want to insure everyone is immunized and not at risk. Recent studies have shown that a small percentage of people who get immunized against Hep. B are not actually immune, so this blood test will determine that I am actually immunized.

There isn't much for me to do in the lab until I can work in the vivarium, so there won't be too much for me to blog about this week.

Also, I have been getting a lot of questions asking what the green dots mean on the brain pictures. I realize it is a little complicated, so I will try to explain again. Basically, half the mice in the study are wild type mice that have the Egr3 gene, while the other half are "knock out" mice that do not have a functional Egr3 gene. Egr3 is activated in response to stress, so once the mice are sleep deprived, more Egr3 should be transcribed. The hypothesis of the lab is that Egr3 is transcribed to be a transcription factor that regulates the gene responsible for making serotonin 2A receptors. The green dots show where the serotonin 2A receptor gene has been activated in the brain. The knockout mice should have very little or no green dots if the hypothesis is correct, because they lack the Egr3 gene, meaning it would not be inducing the serotonin 2A gene. Hopefully that cleared things up?

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Hello and happy Friday!

Since there isn't really anything for me to do in the lab right now I will write a bit about animal models in neuroscience. Part way through my project I made the focus of my project more on the use of animal models to better understand mental conditions in humans, and I have gotten lots of interesting information on this topic while talking to people in the lab.

When using animal models for human conditions, ethics is always a concern, so every study must find a balance between using an animal with a more developed brain that is more similar to a human but considered more unethical to use, and using an animal with a less developed brain that is less similar to a human but considered to be more ethical to use. Very little research is done using primates, because although they would make good animal models as they are quite similar to humans, it is considered unethical to do many experiments on such an intelligent animal. This is why many labs use animals like mice or rats, as they are considered to have developed enough brains to be relevant models for human conditions, but are not as intelligent as a primate.

I find it interesting that animals that seem so different, like humans and mice, still have analogous brain structures and functions. Anyway, have a nice weekend!