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 :)!

Week 3

Welcome to my week 3 blog post!

First, I’m going to look back on last Friday’s lab meeting. Dr. Conrad and her students attend a meeting every week for an hour and a half. The meeting is structured much like a small classroom (some of the students said it was similar to the human event class offered at Barrett), everyone sitting in a circle with a projector to keep us on task. For the first half of the meeting, Dr. Conrad reviewed everyone’s duties in the lab. There are a few studies going on, and she divides up the tasks based on everyone’s interests. The majority of the current studies involve observing rat’s behavior in various mazes and recording it in Excel. For the second half of the meeting, a student leads the discussion on an article. We reviewed the paper that I mentioned in last week’s post. I think that lab meetings are a great way to ensure that everyone is on task, and it was a great way for me to meet more of the students.

Now, back to this week. This week I spent a lot more time in the lab. My paperwork is still being processed, so I couldn’t go into the wet lab. But, I was given something that could be done sitting at a desk. The desks at which I spent all 15 hours this week look like this:

The task that I have been assigned is called Sholl Analysis. This is part of the aging and stress study. They are looking at how stress impacts the brain in both young and old mice. For Sholl Analysis, I am given a binder filled with drawings of neurons. They are working with pyramidal neurons, meaning that they have two sections, apical and basal. I also have an outline with a bunch of circles of different radii, and I need to count how many dendrites (the branched extensions of a nerve cell) go through each circle and record the number in a table. I do this for both the apical and basal part of the neuron. It looks like this:

For the majority of this week, I have been working on Sholl Analysis, but, today, I got a tour of the part of the lab where they keep the rats. I met up with the lab technician and she took me around. They have rooms to keep all the equipment that they need (things like cages, water bottles, bedding, food, etc.). They also have rooms to house the rats involved in the various studies. It looks like my paperwork is getting approved and I will hopefully have clearance to start branching out from Sholl Analysis in the upcoming weeks.

Thanks for following along! 

Week 2

Welcome back to my blog! 

Unfortunately, for the first half of the week, I had a bit more training to do. Monday through Thursday were spent getting three more certifications: Fire Safety, Laboratory Safety, and Hazardous Waste. Everyone working in a lab at ASU must meet these general course requirements. I had to attend a class at ASU to get my Lab Safety credit. All the rest could be taken online.

On Tuesday, I also got to go into the lab for the first time. Since I wasn't quite finished with my certifications, I couldn't go into the wet lab, but I was able to meet some of the students and observe the work that they were doing. All the students that I met are attending Barrett, the honors college at ASU that I will be a part of next year, and were working on their Barrett theses. They are able to their theses in conjunction with the lab.

One woman was working with images of brain slices from around 30 to 40 different rats. For her thesis, she devised a new method of analyzing some of the lab’s old data. The lab was looking at the rats’ ability to navigate a water maze before and after being stressed. She had different brain slices comparing the two conditions saved to her computer. The brain slices were stained to show the activation of a protein in a specific region of the brain (the name of the region has escaped me). She was doing a lot of data crunching while I was in the lab.

Today is Friday, and I am going to be attending my first lab meeting. Everyone working in the lab meets to discuss a research article (I’m not quite sure how a particular one is chosen). The one that we are working with this afternoon is called “Stress revisited: A critical evaluation of the stress concept” by Koolhaas et. Al (I’ve included a link in case you’re interested). The premise of the paper is that our definition of stress is too vague for research purposes and that it is hard to tell whether a stimulus is adaptive or maladaptive. The article concludes that the definition of stress should be restricted to “conditions where an environmental demand exceeds the natural regulatory capacity of an organism,” especially in situations that are unpredictable or uncontrollable.

I will be heading to the lab meeting in about 30 minutes and will be sure to keep everyone updated on how it goes.

Thanks for reading,

Gillian 

Week 1

Hello again!

This week has been a little hectic. Turns out that working in a lab requires a lot of paper work. Who knew? Well, admittedly, I did, but I didn’t expect to be turning in quite so many circles.

In order to work in Dr. Conrad’s lab, I needed approval from two groups: the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) and Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S). So, week 1 was primarily filling out forms and taking tests.

On Monday, I took my sister to ASU to sell Girl Scout Cookies (which, by the way, is a very lucrative business as college students go crazy for them), and thought that this would be a good time to drop off the paper work. So, I stopped by Dr. Conrad’s office, handed her the forms, and ran back to save my sister from the approaching hoard of students. The paperwork was done, so, now, all I needed was to take three tests in order to be approved to work with animals.

On Tuesday, I sat myself in Starbucks to study for and take the exams. The three tests are titled Humane Care and Use of Laboratory Animals, Humane Care and Use of Mice, and Humane Care and Use of Rats, and passing them gains the approval of the IACUC. First, I went through about 30 pages of reading (all the stuff I would be tested on). The first packet was about the acts and regulations in place to ensure that laboratory animals are treated humanely (humane meaning “marked by compassion, sympathy or consideration for other human beings or animals,” as the reading defined it). The result of all the legislation is that there are a bunch of review boards to ensure that laboratory animals are properly cared for. The goal is to guarantee that we eliminate or minimize pain and distress in research animals. The approaches to doing so are categorized as follows;

1 – Refinement of technique

2 – Reduction in the number of animals

3 – And replacement of vertebrate animals with species lower on the evolutionary scale or the employment of non-animal techniques

After completing that exam, the other two were geared specifically towards working with mice and rats. I am happy to say that I passed all three and am now cleared to work with animals.

As a quick side note, even though studying for and taking the tests took a considerable amount of time (about 2 hours), it made me feel much better about working with animals. It is very clear that the utmost care is put into using laboratory animals and that they are used only when they are essential to scientific discovery.

Now, back to my week. On Wednesday, things went downhill. Tuesday night I got really sick to the point where I had about 1 hour of sleep. So, I spent most of Wednesday in a comatose state waiting for my medicine to work (no worries though, it did and I’m feeling much better now).

On Thursday, I woke up to a couple of emails from Dr. Conrad asking about two things that have proven to be very difficult to obtain: a courtesy affiliate ID and EH&S training. A courtesy affiliate ID is so I can work at ASU even though I’m not a student or professor and the EH&S training is so I can work in a lab. I had one email saying that I needed to complete the training in order to get an ID and another email saying I needed to get an ID in order to complete the training. We had found ourselves a paradox. Needless to say, I was very stressed out (quite ironically since that’s what my project is about).

Today, I have been working to resolve this paradox and am happy to say that, after many emails and phone calls, I have received my ID. Now, I can begin my EH&S training.

Overall, what I got out of this week is, when working in a lab, start the approval process as soon as possible because it’s always more complicated than you think it will be. Also, you need to be as active as possible and reach out to as many people as possible in order to get your project off the ground. You can’t just sit passively and hope someone else will sort it out for you.

Thanks for reading! Sorry this post is so long; next week I’ll try to post a couple shorter entries instead of one long one.

Gillian