Welcome back. This week in the lab has been pretty active. We help with the GWAS experiments all week in the mornings as per usual. After we helped with GWAS this week we got too pick brains as Sierra put it. So to begin with Sierra gave us a small cylinder filled with liquid called PBS and rat brain slices that she previously cut. There are 4 small cylinders per rat brain which each contain different sections of the brain. My job was to pick the specific slices of the brain she needed for staining later as apart of her project/ experiment. At first it was a little bit difficult but eventually I got the hang of it.
Unorganized brain slices
When I first started I had no idea what I was looking for and all the brain slices looked the same to me. But Sierra helped me identify the slices she needed and eventually I got pretty good. The first brain I did took me a total of 3 hours to pick but as I got better I was able to cut the time down to only about a half an hour. The process of picking starts with getting a bottle of 20X PBS, which is the liquid that’s used to preserve and help the brains maintain hydration, and diluting it to 1X. Then we used the PBS liquid and filled these little plastic plates with it and poured a cylinder of the brain slices in. From here we begin to identify and pick the slices of the brain we need. We do this by using these tiny paintbrushes and dipping it into some detergent, this removes surface tension making it easier to poke around the slices, and using the tiny paintbrush to move and find your slices.
Organized brain slices read for storage to be saved for staining eventually
After you find the right slices you need to put them in another little plastic plate and organize them, to put them into a separate cylinder to be stained later. You have to be very gentle because it’s really easy to rip the slices which ruins it and makes it unusable. I think this following week they will be staining so it will be cool to see if were here for it. Another thing I was doing this week was preparing to present for a journal club. Journal club is when someone presents a paper relevant to our field from any university in the world and it happens once a week in lab meetings. This following week, our last week, Danika and I have to present a huge 35+ page paper. The paper was very abstract and really long and we were working on the presentation together a lot this week since we will be presenting about it jointly. We also got to see a presentation by Dr. George F. Koob who is considered the grandfather of addiction and Neuropsychopharmacology.
Word and definition/ description created by Dr. George F. Koob
Seriously, recently he has even created his own word called Hyperkatifia that has gotten accepted. He was formerly the PI of the George Lab that I’m in right now but he passes it onto Olivier George when he got promoted to the Director of the NIAAA (National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism). He runs multiple labs across various institutions and continues to try and make advancements in the field of Neuropsychopharmacology, more specifically in Alcohol because that’s what he is more passionate and interested about. Not to mention he’s the director of NIAAA so he flows towards alcohol a little easier anyways. Getting to watch his presentation was really interesting especially because I read the paper he talked about, it is one of his most famous papers and one he cares about the most. I actually mention it in a former blog. Other than that this week for extra activities I went to the beach and La Jolla Cove. I watched another movie at a theater called The Lot in the Cove which was really nice and I also got to eat a monstrous California burrito there that was delicious. I spend a lot of time here at my apartment as well because there’s a lot to offer. I like to be outside at the basketball courts here or at the gym or the pools or bowling alley. Mostly outdoors because the weather is always great. This weather is so nice and incredibly stable unlike Colorado. I have seen reports on snapchat stories of rain and hail at the end of July, Yikes. I don’t miss that at all from Colorado.
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