Murphy Lab- Last Week

Richard again, continuing on from my last post.

My last week was a week with more experiments than usual.  On Monday, I did an STAM with the unc-73 mutant and wild type worms, and then tested chemotaxis up to two hours after training.  I analyzed the images I took of the chemotaxis plates on Tuesday, and bleached my egl-4::GFP worms with the hope of doing one last adaptation assay on Friday.  From what I observed, the unc-73 mutant did not make the food-odorant association as effectively as wild type, but it retained its memory better than wild type did, which is consistent with what Geneva found.

On Wednesday, I did the egl-4 and wild type STAM again, since there were various things that went wrong with my egl-4 strain in the past, and after analyzing my results, it seems that I have good data that confirms what is expected.  I did the goa-1 and wild type STAM on Thursday, and like the unc-73 mutant, the goa-1 worms didn't learn as effectively, but retained a longer lasting association between food and butanone.  Today I was hoping to do one last adaptation assay, but the worms that I had bleached were overgrown, and thus many had died, leaving only the young ones with very few eggs as the worms I had to bleach.  As a result, the worms grew very poorly, and I had to spend much of the day analyzing my data from Wednesday.

Overall, reflecting on these past nine weeks, I felt I've learned a lot.  Doing chemotaxis assays can get a bit routine, but it is nevertheless exciting to test new mutants and see what their learning and memory is compared to wild type.  I was really hoping I could test the egl-4 crh-1 double mutant, since no one else has done that so far, but sometimes matings don't work out.  Still, a lot of the STAMs I performed in the last few weeks were useful replicates for Geneva, and she is in the process of publishing her paper, which she said will most likely have me as one of the authors, since I produced some data that is of use.  And that's really cool, because not many high schoolers can say that they've been published.

Anyway I'd just like to thank Dr. Murphy for giving me the opportunity to work in her lab, Geneva for mentoring me all while she is dealing with her pregnancy, Dr. Peretz for helping me throughout the year, and everyone else involved.  Time to enjoy the last couple of hours I have left in lab.