Hi everyone, I am Natalie Lopez Ramirez, and this is my last week of studying metabolism at the Ye Lab at Scripps. The six weeks I’ve spent here have flown by! I can’t believe it’s already over.
The dolphins we saw on our fishing trip.
I didn’t go into the lab on Monday. Instead, I went fishing! Our lab had its summer outing so we took a fishing trip. We got on a boat and fished off the coast of Point Loma, the trip was 6 hours long! It was a ton of fun and I caught four fish. I definitely could have caught more but I got pretty seasick and had to take a break. We saw so much sea life on our trip too! We saw jellyfish, sea lions, dolphins, and of course a ton of fish. On the way back to shore we spotted a huge pod of dolphins and it got super close to the boat.
The tubes I labeled
Tuesday was a pretty chill day. I started by giving a group of mice food and putting them in the fridge. Then I measured the weight of the mice in the holding room and their food. After that, I labeled 160 small tubes for tomorrow’s dissections. I spent the rest of the day just recording data from the day’s test.
Wednesday was a very busy day. We started right at nine with preparing any last-minute things for our dissections. We had to dissect 30 mice and collect 4 liver samples, blood, 4 white fat samples, 2 muscle samples, and 4 brown fat samples from each mouse. I was in charge of getting muscle samples for the thighs. We had a line of people, each one in charge of getting different things from the mouse. Once one person got their samples they passed it on to the next. We dissected for 6 hours, taking a short break for lunch. After our dissections were done, Alan and I took a short break before going to the holding room and weighing all the mice and their food.
The dishes we had to wash
Scripps Pier!
I started Thursday how I usually start every day. I put a group of mice in a fridge with food and water then went to the holding room and weighed the mice and their food. I got to see the huge dishwasher today, Alan also showed me how to do qPCR. Alan, Neeraj, Chris, and I went out to lunch today. It was to celebrate successful dissections and a goodbye lunch for me. We went to a Japanese restaurant, I had the best ramen! After lunch, we injected the mice in the fridge and recorded data every hour after injection. I went out for dinner, the other pinterns and I got poke! We also went to the Scripps Pier to see the sunset, it was by far the best sunset we’ve seen here.
I couldn’t believe that it was my last day. I started by weighing the mice in the holding room and their food. After that Alan told me that we had somewhere to be. We went with a bunch of people from the lab and went to get boba! It was super good. We spent a lot of time just hanging out and drinking our drinks. My parents made the long drive from home and picked me up from work. We went out to dinner and enjoyed our time together.
Six weeks goes by so fast! My time in San Diego was the best. I couldn’t have asked for a better internship.
Giada and I!!
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