This week was very similar to last week, I worked mostly on my own on the second cohort of mice. The OFT and EPM ran a lot faster, making my days in the behavioral testing rooms a lot shorter. This gave me room in the afternoons to work on practicing more brain flash-freezing.

As I mentioned in my week 1 reflection, our technician, Matt, is moving to England to pursue his PhD, which is why a new tech was starting this week - Sammi! I was given the responsibility to demonstrate some brain flash-freezing for her, which was incredibly nerve-wracking - this was my first time doing this on my own and I was being observed. I had some silly hiccups in the setting up process, such as forgetting to take off my lab coat while being on the elevator or forgetting the dry ice bin… when grabbing dry ice (not my brightest moment). But after setting up, the actual procedure went surprisingly smoothly, I was very proud. I was happy to see the shadowing and practice paying off. If you’re unfamiliar with this technique, it involves submerging the brain tissue in 30% sucrose for over 24 hours and afterwards placing it onto a mold to submerge in an ethanol dry-ice bath to freeze the tissue. 

Finally, I started doing some data analysis through the Prism software. Now that both cohorts had gone through both the Open Field Test (OFT) and Elevated Plus Maze (EPM), it was time to analyze the anxiety and fear-related behaviors. This was done by seeing how much time was spent around the periphery of the chamber for the OFT, as well as the time spent in the open vs closed arms in the EPM. Other measures were analyzed, but I’ll save all that data for my poster. Anyway, so much time was spent in front of the computer, which took a lot of eye strain and focus. 

Overall, this week was following the routine I had picked up last week, so not much new information - lab is very repetitive work, which I’ve grown to be very appreciative of.

Thanks for reading :-)