Week Three

The past week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative has been quite a unique and enlightening experience.

But it started normally though.

On Monday, Caitlin, our secondary advisor, and I ran some more Wes plates. Since we had finished running Wes plates testing for Neuroligin-1 and Glypican 4 in the VPM (ventral posteromedial nucleus) region of mice, we then proceeded to run Wes plates for the S1BF region. After running two plates, I then did some housekeeping work and proceeded to call it a day.

On Tuesday, Caitlin was not in the lab, so my main supervisor Sarah Ogle decided that I assist the Research Lab manager, Bret, on his study involving cage dividers and the reduction of aggression on mice in their cages. So, for the rest of the day, I assisted Bret by accounting for the amount of time a specific rat in the cage spent in a tunnel created by the cage divider.

On Wednesday, Murphy’s Law reared its head.

At 9, Sarah told me to gather samples that we needed for protein extraction of sample tissues from certain regions. But the whole process soon turned into a fiasco due to both mistakes on my part as well as misplacement of sample tissues in previous studies. Truth be told, it took us nearly two and a half hours to find all of our samples top run a protein extraction and assay. After a nerve racking rest of the day, I retired at my usual time.

On Thursday, in lieu of the recent developments (see Wednesday), Sarah assigned me the task of noting down which samples we could find for the hippocampus region of the brain. The region had been used by many different people and as a result were scattered across the lab for me to find. After a few hours of noting down, I then had to leave early to make it back to school.

Till next week, signing off.