Aaron Uy, My 1st week at the Fuccillo lab

I woke up early on Monday, June 11^th in preparation for any unforeseen events on my way to the Fuccillo lab for the 1^st time. Thankfully, I did – I got lost and turned a 15 minute walk into an unfortunate 40 minute walk through Philadelphia, in particular Penn Campus and CHOP. In hindsight, trying to find a shortcut on the first day may not have been the best idea. To add, Apple maps led me to wrong building, but Google maps saved the day. In the end, however, it all worked out as I arrived just in time to meet with the postdoc I would be under, Dr. Kyuhyun Choi, or Kyu for short. He led me to Dr. Fuccillo’s office (the PI) where we discussed some plans for the summer. I was then introduced to some of other the lab members, which included 2 undergraduates, 3 graduate students, a lab manager, and 1 other postdoc. Everyone was warm and welcoming.

Kyu also toured me around the 3 lab spaces the Fuccillo lab uses. These include the main lab area, a separate testing area, as well as a lab space in the "basement" where the mice are held and tested. To enter the basement, you need to put on all this protective gear, and as soon as you enter, the pungent smell of mice hits your face. It even got worse when he showed me where they kept some of the probably thousand mice they use for behavior testing. The smell took a little while to get used to. 

Later, Kyu explained to me the purpose of his research, which had just started. In short, it involves fluorescently labeling 2 neuronal populations in mice brain through injection of viruses that would then lead insight into the function and organization of a portion of the striatum, an area in the brain. 

Kyu showed me some images of slices of brains that contained red and green fluorescent cell bodies. In an interesting exchange, we learned that both of us are colorblind and neither of us could differentiate between the red and green cell bodies – the main point of viewing the brain slices. Fortunately, some manipulation with Photoshop allowed us to tell the difference between the two. He then tasked me with finding a way to quantify the red and green cell bodies in a brain slice. The typical method would be manually count each cell, but considering there are hundreds and maybe thousands of cell bodies on one slice and nearly a hundred brain slices, we both wanted to find a different way. By the end of the week and after lots of research and trial and error with numerous programs, I made a PowerPoint to show to my postdoc and PI. Instead of using a program to automatically count the cells, which doesn’t really work as overlapping cells count as a single cell, the cells could be quantified by processing the image to determine the intensity of the red and green pixels at certain distances from a point in the image. This data can then be be displayed as a line graph. 

Although that was my goal for the week, I participated in many other interesting things in the lab. In the first few afternoons, I observed brain slicing and mounting, microscopy of brain slices, as well as mouse surgery. In the latter half of the week, I moved and assembled mouse behavior chambers as well as calibrated them. During behavior testing, mice are rewarded with chocolate milk, and the amount of chocolate milk delivered needs to be consistent.  

The week ended with the whole lab going to happy hour. Don’t worry Dr. Peretz and Ms. Cozine -although I did attend, I did not participate in the drinking. Nonetheless, I enjoyed a nice end to my first of many weeks at the Fuccillo lab.