I can’t believe that I’m already half way through my internship. Quick summary, my name is Evan Strand and I’m interning at the Doris Neuroscience Center working with mice to find out how changes in metabolism effect the brain.
I spent most of this week processing and graphing data from the experiment that my mentor has been working on for over 15 weeks. The experiment is testing how different proteins promote or inhibit diabetes. In the experiment we have four rows of cages, each row has seven cages, and each cage has four mice, totaling to 112 mice that were testing. With half of the cages we are giving the mice their normal food while the other half we are given a special, high fat diet. Sadly, one of mice’s head burst and died this week. We aren’t sure how the mouse died but we guess that it was a heart attack. When talking with my mentor about it he said that it was expected since the mouse was being fed the high fat diet and was over-expressing Neuropeptide Y (a peptide that causes the mice to eat more),or NPY for short. Also, this week, I help do some ITTs (Insulin Tolerance Tests) and GTT (Glucose Tolerance Test) on our mice. The GTT is used to test the body’s response to being injected with glucose. This test can help determine if any of our mice are diabetic or not. The ITT is used to test the body’s insulin receptors when injected with insulin. This test will further determine if the mice have type 2 diabetes. Over the next weeks of my internship I will be helping my mentor with making a research paper on the findings of our experiment.
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