Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Last week

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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