In this second week we continued working with Marsida on the nicotine rats and did more experiments with them. One experiment was the elevated plus maze. During this experiment the rat is placed in the canter of a elevated “maze” in the + shape where the top and bottom branches of the plus have walls while the two perpendicular branches are open platforms. The purpose of the experiment is to judge the adventurousness of the rats. The more adventurous rats would spend more time on the open branches. If they were not feeling it, they would hide in the walled in branches.
The elevated plus maze
The data from this experiment was for the same four groups as last week but it was varied and all of the groups seemed to be equally adventurous.
The other experiment we did was the open field test. For this experiment the rat is placed in a box that has a grid of 25 equally sized squares. A sensor tracked the movement of the rat as it spent 10 minutes in the box. If the rat stayed in the outer squares near the walls it was feeling anxious, but if the rat ventured into the inner 9 squares it was feeling relaxed. We used the same four groups of rats as we did the previous week and for the plus maze and our results were consistent with the plus maze where there was not much change in the data between the groups of rats.
The open field test
This week taught me that although experiments may sound fun in theory, they can be super boring when you’re actually doing them. We had to sit silently in a dark room and wait 10 minutes for each rat to be finished in both experiments so we spent basically two full days in that dark room in the name of science!
Outside of the office we continued to surf and adventure through the city of San Diego.
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