This past week all the labs under the Columbia Medical Center went through a rigorous government inspection process, a stressful and fortunately very rare experience for all. The days prior we spent a lot of time cleaning benches and labelling beakers, making sure that everything was in compliance with our procedure. I even had to start wearing a lab coat regularly, which was actually quite nice given that the lab is usually freezing cold.
Now that I have finished constructing most of the microdrives, Dr. Hussaini has moved me on to start analyzing some data. Although Geoff (One of the lab members) is working on building a program to analyze data more efficiently, the bulk of the work still must be done manually using a somewhat unintuitive computer program. Since there is a lot of noise picked up by the tetrodes in the brain, my job is to clean up the signals and to identify which data is actually from a neuron and cell. Then by comparing the physical locations where the neuron fired during the experiment and the intensity of the firing, with other trials where the physical testing chamber is altered, I am learning to determine which type of cell is present. While a member of the lab did describe the menial nature of this job as akin to detention, I really enjoy it because I'm able to learn a lot about the nature of the entorhinal cortex and the hippocampus as well as how the data from the experiments performed by the lab actually relates to Alzheimer's disease. Finally, because there is always more data to be crunched, I love that I always have something to do at the lab and am never bored.
This is what good data looks like
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