Kelley Bromley

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…)

I have run out of internet. Scrapjazzers are sleeping, and ebay isn’t posting any new colorbox ink pads… so I’m off to bed. Hopefully someone will update the internet tomorrow :) (more…)

I just noticed that all my posts start with “Well…” heh. I’ll try and stop doing that ;) (more…)

Well, after spending the last few days on my website, it’s about time for me to get started on my genetics assignment before my classmates select all the cool papers, heh. I have a presentation in NRSC500 on Friday next week, so I’ll probably work on that too, but it’s only worth 2.5% and it doesn’t have to be very indepth – just presenting a paper on AMPA recepters. It actually looks like it’ll be a good read :)

After talking to Dr. Song, I will be writing a review paper on the involvement of Notch signalling in embryogenesis right through to neurodegeneration – he’s been invited to do the review, so it’s a shoe in. It’s going to be a lot of work, reading 100 – 150 papers, lol – but it’s good to get something published for my scholarship applications next year. (more…)

Well, after working on the gallery all last night, and all today, it is finally complete. Not so complete that I have descriptions of each photo, but complete enough to start giving out my URL, lol. I ran into SO many problems getting it transferred over to dreamhost… Lionel spent a good few hours trying to make ModRewrite work, but in the end we just left it as script posts, so sorry if the URLs look messy, we tried. (more…)

Well, I finally got the gallery working – it took quite awhile, but it’s going smoothly now, and I think I have all the bumps ironed out, lol. Now all I have to do is transfer the entire site and databases to Lionel’s host and hope it works! I had to install a lot of programs locally for image resizing and other server tasks, so I’m hoping his host has all that stuff. I’ll try and upload more images to the gallery when I get the chance! (more…)