Max and Sierra In the lab
Since the week began with the Fourth of July holiday, we started it with two days off. Our festivities mostly involved hanging at the beach, surfing, and watching the vibrant fireworks from La Jolla Shores. It was tons of fun, but the highlights of the week really came in the lab.
This week we got our own batch of rats! They are new and super cute and cuddly, and our main job for the first few days was just playing with them. Handling them gets them used to humans, and also gets the accustomed to our scent so they aren’t scared when we move them around, which would mess with the results of the research. These rats are going to be put in operant conditioning chambers and given the choice between alcohol and water in order to test the effectiveness of a newly developed drug trying to stop alcohol dependence and addiction. They are technically our rats, as we interns will be doing all of the work to handle and test the animals, under the instruction of our supervisors.
Elevated Plus Maze
This week we also did some scientific testing on the anxiety of rats in nicotine withdrawal. As is common knowledge, when a person or animal is deprived of nicotine, they are often put into a negative emotional state, with anxiety and restlessness as on of the major symptoms. In order to test the anxiety of the rats, we used the elevated plus maze (pictured). The maze is in a “+” shape, with two arms with tall walls and two without. Since rats feel safer in enclosed spaces, if they stay in the closed arms it means they are more anxious and if they explore the open arms they are less. We sat in silence for five minutes for each rat, timing how long they spent in the open and closed arms, and recorded how often they changed arms. All of this is done under red light. Since rats cannot see red wavelength light, they though it was dark out.
The nicotine rats were quite hard to deal with, as they were very anxious and jumpy. As we put them in the maze they would scream and squeal, which makes the experience much less pleasant. They tended to stay to the closed arms, confirming the hypothesis that nicotine withdrawal make rats more anxious.
The only problem was that someone had accidentally used our rat plus maze for mice, and the scent may still be on the apparatus. Thus we had to do the test again, but with our “naive” rats to test if the apparatus is contaminated. Unfortunately, we got very similar results with the “naive” rats, which means the lab may have to buy a new plus maze. On Monday we are going to be doing one last test with a plus maze borrowed from another lab, and if we get the same results, it means that it is not the apparatus, but the testing environment that is skewing the results.
Leisure time
Outside of the lab, lots of our time has been spent going to the beach and hanging out, or back with the host family. I have been helping Tom learn to play guitar on some night and we have been having really great conversations at dinner and breakfast almost every day. Another week in the books and I’m looking forward to our first full week at work.
There are no comments published yet.