Week 5

Welcome to Week 5!

I went into lab Monday, Wednesday, and Friday this week. This week was ASU’s Spring Break, but I decided to come in anyways as many students in the lab were too.

On Monday, I worked on Excel. In case you missed the explanation of what I’m doing in my previous posts, I’m putting all the numbers that I got from Sholl Analysis into a spreadsheet so that we can graph the data. Sorry that’s not too interesting to read about. I’ve been trying to think of more to write, so if there’s any part of working in a lab that you want to hear more about please let me know. In other news, I also figured out where Dutch is in relation to the Psychology building so that makes going to Tempe a little more exciting.

On Wednesday, I worked more on Excel. I also found out that I don’t know how to turn on a Mac desktop computer. I was sitting all alone in lab frantically searching for the power button (which by the way was not on the back of the display as Google had promised) so that no one would know. Unfortunately, one of the students came in, and I had to ask for her help. I also had to ask for the password, so I’m telling myself that, even if I did know how to turn on the computer, I wouldn’t have been able to sign in. So it’s fine.

After that little incident, I finished putting everything in Excel. Thinking I was free, I told the graduate student, Bryce, that I was finished. He seemed very happy with my progress but told me I need to further organize the data, making different pages in the Excel document. Got to admit, I really like organizing and color coding, so I enjoyed this a bit more than I thought I would. Bryce helped with this and told me a little more about the study (or at least the parts of the brain that the study focuses on).

As some background, I am working on the aging and stress study which looks at the impact of chronic stress in old compared to young mice. They are looking at the hippocampus in both groups, specifically the CA3 region. Here’s a picture:

In this region, there are primarily pyramidal neurons which have an apical portion extending from the top and a basal portion extending from the bottom. On the apical portion, if there is only one dendrite extending for a while away from the cell body, the neuron is a long shaft (LS) neuron. If this dendrite branches shortly after leaving the cell body, the neuron is a short shaft (SS) neuron. I’ll include an image of a pyramidal neuron but, unfortunately, couldn’t find one comparing LS and SS neurons.

On Friday, Bryce was out sick, but I finished putting everything in Excel. I had to further organize the rats based on their group (control, stress immediate, or stress recovery). The control rats were not stressed. The stress immediate rats were euthanized immediately after being chronically stressed. The stress recovery rats were given a period of time to recover after being chronically stressed and were then euthanized. I also grouped each rat’s neurons depending on if they were LS or SS. The next step will be graphing all this data.

I hope everyone who was on Spring Break had a great vacation! I am planning to take my Spring Break next week. Thanks for reading!