Busy week!!!!

This week I have been getting assigned various things to do.  So this week has been very busy:

1. I have been doing PCRs.  Basically we cut off the tips of some mice's tails to help determine their genotypes so basically genetic makeup.  It takes a couple days to do this.  I don't mind doing this but it takes a lot of focus to make sure I don't mix up anything because there can be many samples. 

2. Experiments: I'm helping out with the PTSD project by helping with a few experiments.  We inject the mice with a drug and an hour later we run the experiment.  For the experiment the mice are placed in a little cage.  After time a tone is played.  The next time the tone is played the mouse gets a little shock.  Over time the mouse will stop moving, or "freeze" which shows that it is scared.  The freezing will eventually occur to just the tone.  This is a Pavlovian type experiment.  I'm learning how to "score" the freezing this week because next week I will be running 16 mice by myself through this experiment. 

3. Data: One of the experiments had electrodes on a mouse's head so whenever neurons fired at various points, data was collected.  I have been helping the Post Doc rearrange the data. So basically I do a lot of stuff in excel.  I copy and paste between 3 different documents to get the end result.  I believe I finished the last data project for a while.

Tomorrow I will be doing Day 2 of the experiment that was started today.  After that I will be doing another PCR followed by sectioning brains (slicing brains). 

BUSY WEEK!