Week 3

This past week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative started out normally enough.

On Monday, Caitlin, my 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 the mice brain samples, we then proceeded to attempt to run Wes plates for the S1BF region. It started out with a hitch when we couldn’t find all of our samples. In the end, we managed to get what we needed and we ran two plates. I then did some housekeeping and bookkeeping 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 that entire day, I assisted Bret by keeping track of 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 the samples that we were supposed to have already prepared for the protein extraction of brain tissue from specific 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. The main problem was that the samples that we needed that contained the hippocampus chunks had been extracted by three different teams at three different times and were all labeled three different ways. That made it a huge a pain to find all the samples that we needed to run the tests. Truth be told, it took us nearly two and a half hours to find all of our samples to run a protein extraction and then the protein assay. After a nerve racking rest of the day, I was still able to finish everything in a reasonable amount of 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 finished and now have a comprehensive list of where all of my samples are, so the next few weeks should run smoothly, hopefuly.

Week 2

My second week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative was a unique experience.

It started off normal enough. On Tuesday, I, with the help of my research supervisors Sarah and Caitlin, ran some more tests on the Wes machine.We did the normal procedure of preparing the samples and filling out a plate, and we were able to finish a decent amount of work for the day.

On Wednesday, the craziness began. One of my supervisors, Caitlin, was not able to make it, and my other supervisor, Sarah, is one of the busiest people in the department as she is always running around helping out everybody and she is also involved in a various number of projects, and that day she had planned to spend the entire time that I was there in a section of the lab that I do not have clearance to enter, believing that Caitlin would show up to help me out. Since my supervisors were not there to tell me what to do, I thought that it was going to be an easy, relaxed day. Boy, was I wrong. One of the other lab workers decided to put me to the task of cleaning and organizing the freezers. This doesn't sound that bad, but when you have to remove boxes full of slides from freezers set to -80 C and rearrange them in a room at 4 C for four hours, it gets kinda bad. The worst part about it was that the gloves I wore for the entire process were the same type of latex gloves that are used for class dissections, so I could not feel my fingers for the rest of the day. The second worst part was that I didn't even finish organizing half of a freezer, so I will probably have to do this again in the near future.

The highlight of the week had to be on Thursday, during the weekly lab meetings where everyone discusses the issues in the lab and any new findings that have been made. There is also a presentation by one of the researchers every week, and this week Matt, the one who had to present, had not gathered enough data for a proper presentation, so he shared an article that he thought was relevant to the majority of the researchers in the lab. It turns out that he had only read the abstract before sending it to all of the other researchers, and it also turned out that the article he had selected was utter crap. So the next two hours were spent ripping apart the article in a thorough fashion, and they turned the presentation into a session to teach me and the other interns about how not to write a scientific paper.

Friday went back to normal to some degree, but due to the lack of organization in a freezer that I did not have a chance to organize, we were not able to find the proper samples, and we spent most of the day finishing leftover busy work. And that's how this week went.

Week 1

My first week at the Arizona Biomedical Collaborative at the Translational Neurotrauma Lab can be wholesomely described as an entirely new and alien experience.

Before joining the research efforts at the ABC, I had a very preconceived notion about the nature of the research. I thought that the professor controls everything within the lab and dictates every responsibility to high school interns out of a sense of untrustworthiness. Also, I thought that to pursue research was to throw yourself into the fire immediately with some training and you proceeded under the watchful eye of the professors and lab interns.

All of these notions were proven a mix of truths and untruths.

Anyways, here is a brief overview of what I accomplished this week.

On Monday, I learned all about the materials needed to properly run the Wes machine, a tool that simulates a western blot and cuts the run time down from two days to three hours, and where they were all stored, which is important information to consider for experiments.

Due to my supervisor being extremely busy on Tuesday, I was exempt from going to the lab as she would not be there to guide me.

On Wednesday, I ran a sham plate for the samples from the VPM region of the brain for Sprague Dawley rats to ascertain which samples would be appropriate to run with the injured samples. Sham is the term used to refer to uninjured rats, and the VPM is one of the regions of the brain that we are looking at.

On Thursday, I participated in a lab meeting with all the personnel in the lab. There, we discussed specific projects that other lab personnel were pursuing as well as addressing problems and solutions to many issues in the lab. Afterwards, we watched a presentation on a study on the reduction of aggression in mice after the addition of a corrugated plastic cage divider, where it was ascertained that a cage divider heavily affected aggression levels in mice in a positive manner. Then, lab personnel offered other avenues to pursue as well as improvements to make on the experiment. After the lab meeting, my advisor then again extensively reviewed the steps needed to run the Wes machine again and I wrote the steps in my lab notebook.

On Friday, I began creating WES plates for the actual study that I am helping in. It took me three hours to gather all of the materials and fill the plate due to unforeseen problems, but I was still able to run two plates in the end.