Our final week at the lab was rather slow, there wasn’t much to do as the animals recovered from their surgeries. Unfortunately, the experiments with the new cohort of animals will start Monday, right after Ry and I leave. However, we still found things to do. Given the large numbers of animals that were dissected the week before, there were many organs that needed to be put in tubes and frozen, all the tubes we labeled last week would be used for this. So for much of the week we were freezing organs. This takes putting the organ in dry ice briefly, then putting it in its respective tube, then in dry ice again. This allows the organ to be frozen thoroughly with out freezing to the side of the tube or having its chemical or mechanical structure altered. In addition we had a day of “pooping” the animals and baseline irritability testing. The “pooping” is collecting their poop so the makeup of their mircobiome can be analyzed, and the irritability testing is a measure of aggressive and defensive behavior. Both these tests are baselines so they will be compared to what the animals looks like after the experiment, while they are in withdrawal. The poop will be used by Sierra, a PhD student, as part of a paper she is writing in order to graduate, while it is expected that the animals in withdrawal will exhibit more aggressive behavior. In addition to this Ry and I made a presentation going over our time in San Diego that we presented to whole lab. We were both pretty nervous, mostly because Olivier, the PI, would be there. However, it went really well, and we had somewhat of a going away party in the conference room, complete with some absolutely delicious Chinese food.
Outside of the lab we made a visit to the beach and Claire was kind enough to take us to a final dinner at the La Jolla Tennis and Beach Club. Here I had some very good salmon, though I wish I had gotten the filet mignon.
I was sad to leave, as I really enjoyed my time in the lab and was amazed how every single
person I had worked with and met was so nice. I am very thankful for Claire hosting us in her house, everyone in the lab for showing me what research in a lab us like, especially Marsida for working so closely with
us, it was awesome to get so much attention from such an intelligent person despite her busy schedule, and Olivier for accepting us to work in his lab.
I had a great experience, learned a lot, and was happy to make so many new friends.
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