Hello Everyone, I am Natalie Lopez Ramirez and this is week two of studying metabolism at the Ye Lab at Scripps.
I had Monday off because of Juneteenth. The other pinterns I am staying with also had the day off, so we spent the day shopping and at the beach.
A brain in agarose, ready to be sliced.
On Tuesday I went straight into starting a new test with mice. I made 20 injections for the test, one for each mouse. 10 of the injections had deoxycholic acid and the other 10 had saline. The mice are put in a fridge in their own cage and without food for four hours before we inject them, then we add food. Then every hour after injection we check their temperatures and how much the food weighs. We do this to see if there is a significant difference between how much the two groups of mice are eating. While I waited to check on the mice I entered some raw data from our previous tests into excel and did some video annotations. After the test was done I got to slice some brains with the vibratome.
On Wednesday I got to pretty much run a test on my own. I did a cold test (the mice were put in a fridge) 0n a group of connexin mice without any injections to see how much they were eating. I entered some more data into excel while I waited in between checking the mice. It was a shorter work day because of a Scripps Happy Hour. From 3-5, all of Scripps got together for appetizers and drinks. It was a lot of fun meeting people from other labs.
One of the slides I got to mount!
I didn’t see the mice on Thursday. I spent all day in the actual lab. In the morning I entered data into excel and did video annotations. Then after lunch, I got to mount brain slices onto slides. I got to mount the entire brain, starting from the olfactory bulb to the cerebellum. After mounting I sliced brains in the vibratome, this time I sliced starting at the cerebellum. Usually, we start at the bulb but my mentor wanted to look at a different region so we changed it up a bit.
I started Friday by preparing some mice for a test and making injections. That morning everyone in our lab attended a seminar where Anton Maximov, the head of a different lab in the Dorris Neuroscience Center, presented his tests about how a brain holds memory. After the seminar, we continued our test and I did a lot of video annotations.
I’ve spent a 
lot of my free time at the beach or sitting around a little fire with the other pinterns. Saturday I spent the entire day at whispering sands beach in La Jolla. I can’t believe it’s already been two weeks. I’m excited to go into my third week!
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