Kole Shugars: Addiction and Neuroscience, Week Five

This week in the lab we mostly transferred rats to their alcohol administration chambers where they would spend an hour then we would take them back to their home cages.  In the alcohol administration cages the rats have two levers and two different bowls, with each lever delivering fluid to its respective bowl.  One of the levers was for water and the other for alcohol.

Once the rats start pressing the lever for alcohol enough to prove they are addicted, Giordano, the alcohol specialist, injects them with a drug called Daun-02 which will activate Beta neurons in the brain which are attached another neuron called CFos.  The CFos neuron is the neuron that tells the rat that he is addicted to alcohol and it controls the rat’s addiction.  When the Beta neuron is activated it suppresses the CFos neuron which kills the rat’s memory that it was addicted to alcohol.

The last time that Giordano injected the rats, they almost completely lost their addiction to alcohol and didn’t start avidly using it for two weeks. That is how long it generally takes for the rats to become addicted in the first place, which basically proves that the rat is no longer addicted after this injection. There must be many more trials before they can publish this finding and then transfer it into a drug that can be used in humans which could end alcohol addiction.

We also did perfusions to preserve dead rats’ brains so that further testing could be performed on the neurons of the animals.

We also did an experiment called the Loss of Righting Reflux test.  In this test we injected the rats with enough alcohol as to where they got extremely tired and fell asleep.  Once they fell asleep we started a timer and we could only stop the timer after they had turned from their backs to their bellies three times in one minute for three consecutive minutes.  It was pretty fun watching these drunk rats try to turn over but we had to wait for quite a while for it to happen.

Outside of the lab we went surfing a lot and walked around Del Mar.  This weekend is supposed to have a lot of rain due to the hurricane in Mexico and the surf is supposed to get pretty big as well!