Week 3 with smells and further discussions

This is Jocelyn and I'm working on olfaction in mice at Duke University. This is
my third week here.

This week in general was very low key. For the first two days, I counted cells and
analyzed photos taken by the microscope on ImageJ. These photos were of the olfactory
epithelium. There were two versions of the photos we took. One was the nuclear
staining which stained nuclei in the tissue; the other was the cy3 staining which
is the antibody staining. Unfortunately I don't have any of those photos but
they're brilliant! Especially when you see the different colors under the
microscope.
For journal club on Monday, Jianghai presented his paper on Expression of Ectopic
Olfactory Receptors. I read the paper in advance so I understood most of what he
discussed during the meeting. Next monday, Yue is going to present about
earwax! Yue got held up by some bureaucratic stuff and only came back last week
from China. Anyway I'm excited to read the paper.

On Wednesday, we meet with different departments and first year grad students
present their research topic. This week Edward presented the effect of UV light on
egg-laying site preference in Drosophila. It was really cool! After that, the rest of
the day was pretty uneventful and I got to leave at 14:30! which was nice since I
had been staying until at least 6 on some nights the previous week.
Neha gave me some papers to read about RTP1 and RTP2 proteins. There were a
lot of terms I didn't know and since I didn't have my computer with me that day, I
asked Neha to explain them. She ended up taking half an hour explaining all of
the terms in full detail. It helped me understand our project even more too.

Yesterday we made a plan to make two clearing solutions (Scale and SeeDB) that
make the brain samples clearer to see. Scale contained urea, glycerol and triton X.
SeeDB contained different %s of fructose. We made all the calculations. Then we
made 4% Pfa which fixes the brain samples onto the slide.

(People sensitive to or against using animals in the lab, please don't read this
paragraph because you'll be disturbed. I was.)
After lunch - we were going to dissect. Neha didn't specify what we were
dissecting so when she brought in six mice to sacrifice then dissect, I was
shocked. The lab's method of euthanasia was a chamber full of CO2. We went into
the dissection lab and Neha showed me how to sacrifice the mice. She grabbed
one mouse by the tail then put it into the chamber. After two minutes or so, the
mouse was still and Neha basically dislocated the vertebrae from the rest of the
body. Then she decapitated the mice and started dissecting. At this point, I was
speechless. The room started getting really cold - I think that was just me. I told
Neha that I couldn't do it and she was really nice about it. I ended up sacrificing
one mouse but I couldn't dissect it. It was definitely a once-in-a-lifetime
experience.

Earlier in the week, Hiro (my PI) came to talk to me about what I'd be doing on the
days that Neha would be gone (next wednesday-friday). He is a great PI and so
hands on. He's been working with another summer student and he's always
around. I told him that we needed to present our projects at Science Night at the
end of fall term and he offered to make a time for me to present to the lab my last
day. I think it's going to be a good experience for me! to talk to grad students
about the research Neha and I did. It'll be good practice for Science Night too!