This was an exciting week for my internship as I was finally able to handle the rats being used for research. Most of what the interns in the lab (including me) do is transfer rats from their home cages to self-administration chambers and back, while also cleaning the self-administration chambers. Cleaning the chambers, though it may sound laborious and rather boring, is actually crucial. It is important that each rat experiences the same thing, otherwise the experiment would be invalid. So the self-administration chambers must be cleaned with a disinfectant between rats because if not their behavior could be altered by the scent left by the rat previously in the cage. Rats have a complex social structure and much of it is communicated through the scent of pee, as such if the chambers aren’t cleaned each rat would act differently based off who was in the cage previously. Most exciting however was that we were finally able to handle the rats. This was super exciting as watching other people handle the rats then having to clean the cages is not extremely rewarding. While the idea of holding rats took me a little while to get used to, after holding the rats I realized that they were actually super cute and after smelling the mouse room I was quite glad that we got to work with rats rather than mice.
Currently there are five sets of rats being run at the lab right now. Dana, a lab technician, is working with a set of “oxy rats” or rats addicted to oxycodone. She is testing an enzyme that she hopes will effect the rats urge to self-administer the drug. Marsdia, one of the lead post-docs is running a group of nicotine rats. Similar to Dana she is testing the effect of an enzyme on the self administration of nicotine. She explained to me that a chemist, who also works at The Scripps Research Institute, made a “vaccine” against nicotine addiction by taking an enzyme from a bacteria that lives on tobacco plants by breaking down the nicotine in the plant. I have not worked much with either Dana or Marsida’s rats as normally I am gone when they put in and take out the rats. However, I work with all three of the other sets of rats. All of them are alcohol rats. Two of the groups are being trained in the alcohol self-administration chambers. This “training” is actually them getting addicted to alcohol, but in order to mimic the human condition of addiction they aim to have the rats choose to drink alcohol over water. This is difficult as rats generally strongly prefer water to alcohol because of alcohol’s adverse taste. So in the training they build a dependence on alcohol and learn to drink it despite the bad taste. The final set of rats are being used by Adam, another post doc. He has a group of rats that are not dependent on alcohol and a group that is. The dependent group’s addiction is built by housing them in chamber that for 8 hours a day is filled with alcohol vapor. We put these rats in the self-administration chambers when their alcohol vapor has been off, so they are in withdrawal. Adam is studying the differences in behavior between the two groups, as well as differences in their brain, this will come after the rats are dead.
We have also been doing other work in the lab. This week we’re taught how to make catheters that will be used in a few weeks for the couple hundred GWAS rats when they arrive. Unlike most rats used in the lab the GWAS rats will be very genetically diverse, allowing for them to test on a diverse gene pool, rather than an inbred one, closer mimicking human population. In addition to making catheters we spent part of a day slicing brains and ordering them to be placed on slides. Also Marsida has been assigning the interns papers that we read and present to each other. This week Kevin and Niki, two other interns, presented to us a paper on the biology that has been found to lead rats to continue to self-administer alcohol even in the presence of a high reward alternative. In the study it was found that about 15% of rats trained to self-administer alcohol will choose alcohol over a sweet solution. This 15% is paralleled in humans, as 15% of people who drink will become or are dependent. It was found that the rats who preferred the alcohol had less GABA transmitters. When the lab downregulated the GABA transmitters in rats who preferred the sweet solution they began drinking more alcohol. Leading them to believe that the down regulation of GABA transmitters is a factor in developing an alcohol dependence.
Outside of the lab we also had fun. Ty, who is interning at UCSD, arrived at our house at the beginning of the week. The three of us went to the beach a few times, and Ty brought a PS4 so we’ve also been playing some Fortnite. Some friends of mine, the Spauldings were in the San Diego area so one night I joined them for dinner. It was nice to hear about the happenings of Telluride. Also the three of us and Emmanuel, who is interning with Ty visited the San Diego Zoo on Saturday. After spending about 5 hours in the zoo we had seen just about every animal and used just about all the features that came with a ticket, including a sky tram ride. All in all it has been a great week both at work and out of it.
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