Student Research at Duke

My time thus far with my lab and the research fellows program has been enjoyable and productive. There have been setbacks, such when the brilliant people who painted my room accidentally painted my door shut so I had to wait outside of it for an hour before I could get in. However, I did eventually get in and unpacked and here I am.

I’m working in Dr. Wang’s lab in the cell biology department along with Andrew Lyu, a fellow research fellow. Last week I learned how to do immunostaining of slides with PGP 9.5. I also watched my mentor remove embryos from a pregnant mouse and then extract each embryo’s brain and prepare it for sectioning. I’ve used the sectioning machine, which is -22 degree Celsius and therefore, as you can easily imagine, very, verrry cold. Cleaning it is probably my least favorite activity since the blade is very cold and my glove became mildly stuck to it. But what is research without a few sacrifices?

The people in my lab are amusing, friendly, and helpful. I was glad to learn they all enjoy free things (like food) as much as I do, and I enjoyed some breakfast and ice cream in a day thanks to a vendor fair. My mentor has been very helpful thus far. He presented last week at our lab meeting. Prior to starting work this summer I only had a vague idea of what I was doing since I wasn’t handed any papers yet. However, I received about 14 along with video clips and powerpoint presentations, so I spent a better portion of a few workdays just reading and letting the information sink in.

My specific project will be using advillin-cre mutant mice to determine where the problem occurs in their sensory pathway- is it localized to their central or peripheral nervous system, or it is generalized? In particular, I’ll be looking at limbs, whisker pads, trigeminal ganglions, and the spinal cords of these mice. I’ll also be staining to see if synapses have actually formed (sometimes, there may be branching of the sensory neurons but no synaptic formation occurs). I’m excited to see what this research holds. I’ll be sure to post more as time goes on explaining some of the aforementioned things. However, I don’t have much else to say about that now because I have yet to start on this specific project, mainly due to the silliness of someone in the mice room who decided that the mutant mouse was dead when it wasn’t yet dead and threw it in with the dead mice without killing it (?!?)… I suppose the said person didn’t realize we were making mutants? That’s another thing with the mice I’m looking at- they’re born normal but then their limbs become oddly formed, and they do not grow normally. Death usually sets in around 13 days.

I have some really great photos of the lab, but I’m still not sure how to post them since we apparently need a URL and the file size is too big when I try uploading normally. Hmm..hopefully I figure that out soon because I’d love to share these pictures!

Oh, and in other news, I recently discovered that my lab has lots of Current Biology, Cell, and Neuron journals sitting around…which now means I can be productive while waiting for things to run/wash/whatever. I read some interesting articles today in Current Biology, one which was about how they found birds in different cities have actually changed their songs to compensate for ambient noise in the city, both in terms of frequency and length. It made me ponder just how big of an effect things we do have on other species. Just some food for thought. More to come later.