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.