Emmy Wang, Entry #3, Back to the Lab

This week I came back to my lab in Trondheim after taking month off while everyone went on holiday (and my PI went to China for a conference). The weather has become 200% more rainy and the temperature has dropped about 10 degrees as autumn quickly arrives. Today Dr. Berg, the new postdoc Dr. Xi, and I went to the confocal microscope with my 13 preparations. Dr. Xi has just joined the lab so she is learning most things from the beginning, and sometimes she'll ask me about the method of staining or fixing or how to care for the insects.

Preparations

We scanned two preparations, one stained from the antenna and showing the sensory neurons, and one stained from the antennal lobe showing the secondary neurons. I was a bit nervous about how successful the second one would be, since when I was staining directly into the antennal lobe I really was not sure whether I had actually located the brain or if I was just pushing dye into some random muscle tissue, but the scan came out quite nicely.

Grabbing a snack while waiting for a scan

It took a while for each scan so it was a chance for us to get caught up and to eat some pancakes. The confocal microscope scans the brain in slices, and it is very convenient to use insect brains since they are so small that they do not need to be physically sliced up.  We were able to see the neurons coming from the antenna and into glomeruli in the first scan, and the neurons along the tracts going into the higher processing regions in the second. Every preparation gives a unique image so there is always something new to be seen, and there are so many things going on in the image that I could watch it for hours.

One slice of the first scan

Above is the scan of the first preparation with the glomeruli. I somehow managed to accidentally delete the second scan off my USB within like 10 minutes of playing around with it so we have to copy it again when we go back to the microscope next week. They also have a new confocal microscope so my PI is hoping we can go back and become familiar with how to use it, and practice on some of my preparations next week. The new masters students, as well as a guest researcher and another PhD candidate, should be arriving soon, which I am looking forward to!