Wow, I'm behind!
June 13-17th, 2011
Starting on Monday I was helping one of the post Docs do a fear experiment. I placed the mice in a room with a white noise maker for an hour. Then we injected them with a drug that hypothetically treats PTSD or a saline injection (done at certain time intervals so that two mice are used in the experiment at a time). After another hour, the experiment begins! The mice are placed in a small box. For the first three minutes of the experiment, nothing happens. Then a 30 second tone plays followed by a small foot shock. The tone plays three times, and the mice are shocked three times. A measure of fear is when the mouse "freezes." So over the course of the experiment I mark down every 5 seconds if the mouse is "frozen." It's a little mind numbing after a few mice... and we had 14!
Tuesday is when we do fear extinction. For extinction, we use a different room (different odors and environment). This one LASTS FOREVER. I began around 8 am.. .took a break around 11 am.. then was done about 1:15 PM with all the mice. In ten days from the first day (Monday) we do another experiment called "retrieval."
The rest of the week I was not very busy. I did some work with data for a different Post Doc... Did another PCR for a post-bacc. Otherwise, I didn't do too much else. Slow week.
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