Research Update
Eight weeks certainly seemed like a long time when I first arrived in Durham, but now at the end of the fifth week, I’m starting to realize just how slow the research process is. We are finishing up our second week of activity boxes today and the results are encouraging. Initially the activity boxes were meant to be used as a means of determining whether the mice were capable of performing in the later mazes; /img003.JPG)
however, after running the number through Excel and making LOTS of graphs, we think there may be a difference in the knockout mice’s activity levels during the day versus at night.
So the next step is going to be… more testing! We’ll be running the mice through what’s called an “elevated plus maze” in which two of the arms of the maze are blocked off by high walls whereas the other two arms are completely open. The idea of the maze is to test for anxiety by measuring how much time is spent in the dark, closed-off arms as opposed to the open arms (which to the mice are pretty scary). We’re hoping to see if maybe the differences in activity level that we noted are due to either an elevated or depressed level of anxiety. In other news, we’re lucky to have a new cohort of mice coming in this next week to add to our numbers. As of now, we have only been working with 23 mice, so it’s been difficult finding any significant differences. With only three weeks left, we’ve still got a lot to do - plus mazes and water mazes for the older mice, as well as running the younger rats through both the SHIRPA screens and activity boxes! Yikes!