Peddie EXP Summer 2018

My fingerprints haven’t been processed yet, and with my luck, I think they’ll be done by the time I leave the lab. At this point, I don’t really mind though. Yesterday, I learned about sectioning rat brains and how to identify layers of the rat brain based on a rat brain atlas. The hippocampus and dentate gyrus has basically been plastered into my brain by now  (-- and my nose, they smell terrible), and I am really happy to say that I will have no interactions with live rats. I tried to take a quick picture of a section of the brain, but someone caught me (oops). Otherwise, I’ve been paired with an undergrad from Temple U, who I’ve gotten along really well with, and I met another senior in high school from Texas who’s also working in the lab. We got into this really long conversation about colleges over lunch, and that is the last time I want to think about it for the summer :). I think I’ve got around two weeks left, which seems like too short of a time for me to finish the projec...

This week, most of the veterinarians and orthopaedic surgeons took a much-needed week off due to the hectic surgery days that occurred last week. I continued to work on my IVD degeneration disease load study with sections of canine cervical and lumbar spine. Furthermore, I monitored the eleven canine models that underwent full hip arthroplasties last week to make sure they were doing well during their post-op recovery period. I received sections of canine cervical and lumbar spine from the veterinary medical diagnostic lab (VMDL) after a complete necropsy. This was my first time harvesting full sized canine IVDs out of the spine, which proved to be quite a different process than removing tail IVDs. Instead of using hemostats and bone-cutting forceps, I used a sterile bandsaw used specifically in the lab for removing full canine IVDs. The harvesting process included trimming the tissue and muscle that surrounded the spinal column in order to reveal where the IVDs were located. Then,...

During Week 5, I worked on connecting the two equipments: the hydra harp and the stages. The hydra harp is the equipment that counts the photons when the sample is excited, and the stages is a moving microscope that examines the sample. Therefore, in my code, I inputted the movement of the stages, which is 3 dimensional, then I allowed it to count photons while it moves to different locations. Dr. Peretz visited me this week, and it was really nice for me to show her what I’ve been doing so far and how the lab environment is. I can’t believe 5 weeks have already passed and I only have one more week.