Ella White: Addiction and Neuroscience, Week One

Week 1 June 15-June 19, 2015

During the next six weeks I, and another intern: Kole Shugars, will be working in the George Lab under the PI Olivier George and post-doc Marsida. This lab is a part of The Scripps Research Institute(TSRI) in La Jolla, CA, focused on the neurobiology of addiction. The researchers are currently looking into the wiring of the brain that contributes to drug effects and, in doing so, are investigating ways that may better prevent and stop addictions compared to the current methods.

Marsida, in particular, is researching into nicotine, including its withdrawal behavior in rats and the brain make up that results after use of the drug. She currently has two projects going on right now. The first one consists of 11 rats, 6 being long term access and 5 being short term access (one died during surgery). The long term access guys have constant access to nicotine in fluid form for 21 hours, being taken of for three hours each day. The short term access rats on the other hand only have access to the nicotine for an hour each day. Both have food and water available to them at all times. It is a pretty cool system in which the rats self administer the drug themselves, in order to most closely copy the realistic human behaviors of self administration. The rats are first made dependent on nicotine through exposure to the nicotine, after that they are placed in cages to learn the technique, the intravenous self-administration procedure, of obtaining more nicotine in their system. The cages are set up so that the rats have to press a lever in order for the drug to filter out of a syringe, through a tube, and down into a catheter that is placed within the jugular vein. This lab was first set up to look at the food, water, and drug intake of the rats, but now is hoping to confirm a previous study.

Her second project consists of 32 rats, one group of eight rats that are completely naive(not exposed to any drugs) and four groups of six rats being administered either a)controlled, b)low, c)medium, or a d)high concentrations of nicotine vapor. This lab is mimicking Electronic Cigarettes (E-Cigs) to figure out the impact of taking/being exposed to nicotine as an adolescent and how the development of the brain while exposed to nicotine vapor effects the likelihood and development of an addiction as an adult.

Marsida also has another intern, a college student name Lily, working with her on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

For the past week we have been shown around the building and watched first hand the research going on. Currently, the job consists of cleaning the rat’s cages and observing their behaviors. At around 12:00 p.m. each day the rats from Marsida’s first project are taken out of their self administration cages and moved into portable cages that we then place in another room for three hours. We then clean out the cages, put in fresh litter, and check all the boxes to make sure the nicotine filled syringes are relatively full and the mechanical equipment that administer the food, water, and drug are working.

After three hours, both the long and short access groups are put into the cages and their sessions are started. After an hour we take the short access rats and put them into their other cages.

The other project has let us participate in more scientific research and the collection of data. The 32 rats (from the nicotine vapor chambers) were taken and weighed after one week in the nicotine chambers. We then performed three different evaluations on them: Open field test, Von Frey test, and observation of the behaviors. Each rat was observed for 10 minutes in each test, with their behavior being recorded by hand or camera.

For the behavioral observations we marked down how many times they blinked, shook the head, teeth chattered, had abdominal pains, and paw tremors. In addition, we recorded their diarrhea, tremors, hair quality, and gait on a scale from 0 to 3, with 3 being extremely evident and 0 being not at all perceptible.

In addition to all of this, we are taking online courses that teach us about the care and use of animals in research, specifically rats. This week we were also assigned three papers to read on neurobiological discoveries: VTA CRF neurons mediate the aversive effects of nicotine withdrawal and promote intake escalation(overview),chronic nicotine activates stress/reward related brain regions and facilitates the transition to compulsive alcohol drinking(overview), and Recruitment of medial prefrontal cortex neurons during alcohol withdrawal predicts cognitive impairment and excessive alcohol drinking. They were very interesting papers to reread and I am looking for a chance in the future to discuss them with Olivier.

So far this internship has been amazing. It is located in a wonderful region, at a super cool institute, has introduced me to many incredible scientists and I have gained first hand experience on what research looks like in action.