Week 4

Welcome back for week 4!

I didn’t get a chance to report on last Friday’s lab meeting, so I’ll quickly do that now. We discussed an article by Grissom et al titled “Struggling behavior during restraint is regulated by stress experience.” This paper examines how rats react to stress based on their history (essentially whether the stressor is novel or whether they have been introduced to that stressor before). It uses new vocabulary that is relevant to Dr. Conrad’s lab. Homotypic stress is day after day of the same restraint. Heterotypic stress is one stressor over and over followed by the introduction of a novel stressor. After comparing these two groups, the study concludes that stressors depend on the type and history of the animal, for this will change their reactivity to the stressor. I really appreciate that the lab learns from articles relevant to the studies that they are conducting and incorporates their findings into their own research. 

Back to this week. I went into the lab Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday (today). On Tuesday, I finished Sholl Analysis, meaning I got through all the drawings of neurons. This was the first time I really felt that I was helping out the lab as everyone seemed pretty surprised that I got through it so quickly. The study has been ongoing since 2010, so it felt great to have completed even a portion of it. For the rest of Tuesday, I made mesh wire restraints used for stressing mice. I had to dip the mesh wire into a black goo that then dries to cover and exposed edges. Even though it was fairly simple, it was fun to be able to do something in the actual lab under a fume hood.

On Wednesday, I made more of the restraints. After hanging them out to dry, I began putting all the data I got from Sholl Analysis into Excel so that we can graph the data points. Previously, I had written the number of dendrites crossing each circle on a piece of paper, so I simply transferred that into a spreadsheet. It’s a bit tedious and there’s a lot to do, but I enjoyed it a bit more than I thought I would. There’s something kind of relaxing in plugging away at a repetitive task, and it’s nice to know that I’m working towards a larger goal.

Today, I have been sitting in lab writing this blog post. We have a lab meeting in about half an hour. An undergraduate student attending Barrett is going to practice presenting his thesis. Since I’ll be attending Barrett, I’m excited to see what the honors thesis entails. For the rest of the day, I’ll probably continue putting numbers into Excel.

Overall, even though a lot of the work that I’m doing in the lab is a bit tedious, I’m really happy with the experience that I am getting. A lot of the stuff that I am doing happens behind the scenes for every study, and I never put much thought into all that goes on in a lab. The first thing that comes to mind is always the actual collecting of data, never the processing of those numbers. It’s nice to have a different perspective on working in a lab.

Thanks for reading!

Update: It's a little later Friday afternoon and I have some time to add onto my post before I head home. In the lab meeting, everyone helped to edit the Barrett thesis that one of the undergraduate students presented. It was all about the work that he had been doing in the lab. After the meeting, Dr. Conrad taught me and another student how to check the data we had entered into Excel. Since it is such a repetitive task, it is very error prone, so we print out the document and compare what was entered to the raw data. We worked on the data the undergraduate had put in. She read the raw data to me and I ensured that it was the same number that was entered into Excel. Thanks again :)!