Oliver Crane, Entry #3, Excel

These past two weeks have gone by incredibly fast! Things at my lab have become way more busy and intense as the lab manager prepares to leave next week for a new job at a tech company. I’ve been given a wide range of new responsibilities and duties to carry out which I have been enjoying a lot. I have spent most of my time organizing the huge amounts of data from our mice trials in excel. Usually this takes a few hours of steady work in order to create master spreadsheets that make it very easy to analyze our data as well as graph it. I have also gotten to witness some pretty cool (and somewhat sad) lab surgeries.

Virtual imaging of mice brains.

At the end of the trials, we must harvest the mice brains which have been previously injected with a virus (to highlight specific neural signal pathways) in order to further study the effect of the various drugs given to them. This procedure usually involves first putting the mouse to sleep so it feels no pain and then cutting open its chest. Formaldehyde is then pumped into the still beating heart (which propels it throughout the body) thus almost instantaneously freezing all the cells of the mouse in place and in the process killing it. This ensures that brain cells will not be changed in any way. The mouse is then decapitated and its skull is broken open in order to remove the brain. Although all this is done in the most humane and painless way possible, it is still very sad. However, the benefit of being able to study these brains is incredibly immense to further opiate research.

A mouse being prepped for surgery.

Outside of work these past two weeks have been a lot of fun as well. I went hiking with my sister for two days who is thru-hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. We also got to watch some incredible fireworks in Los Angeles for July 4th which involved a lot of eating and searching for donut stores (I eventually found one that was open and bought a fresh dozen). I can’t believe we only have two weeks left already, our time here has been incredibly rewarding and yet it has unfortunately gone by so fast. I look forward to finishing my EXP experience with a great last two weeks!

ALLEN Brain Atlas.