I had my first real day in my new lab rotation in Dr. Christie’s lab today! Kyle taught me how to do LTD in rat hippocampal CA1 cells. Fun stuff! He’s a pretty good teacher and let me do my own thing unless I had a question. It went well for my first run I think! I felt a bit stunned at one point when we were doing a measurement on the sterotaxic instrument (lets you place electrodes in rat brain very precisely, according to a set of published coordinates) and bregma (a landmark) was at 1.03 and we had to go over 0.30 and I felt so nervous I couldn’t even subtract properly – I actually used a calculator to get to 0.73. So embarrassing. I just hadn’t done this stuff for a while! Anyway, after that little bit of uncomfortableness the rest went ok.
My next task will be looking at the effect of stress on LTD. The procedure is pretty much the same, I just have to stress the rat before hand. Kyle is going to help me with the first rat, and then I’m sure I’ll be fine doing the experiment on my own. The only thing I hate is doing the initial injection to knock the rat out! We use urethane, which is a potent carcinogen and causes tumours and all kinds of nasty things, and the rats wiggle a lot =/ We inject them IP, which just means into the gut, by flipping them over and poking their belly. Apparently they kick so hard sometimes that they can bend the needle! I DO NOT want to poke myself with that needle! We wear a heavy glove on the hand holding them, but still I don’t like that part. Kyle did it this time, but I’m going to do it next time – I mean, I have to do it at some point, heh. I’ll let you know how it goes, we have the experiment planned for Tuesday!! (more…)
