Week Six

This week, I will be preparing chemicals and materials for cryostat use and tissue staining. Additionally, I will aid during surgeries and experimentation.

As we have been preoccupied by the surgeries and experimentation, we have not yet gotten a chance to test out Barrow Neurological Institute's new cryostat. We are hoping to use it either this week or next.

In preparation for slicing tissues, we must prepare chemicals for preservation and staining. Phosphate-buffered saline, or PBS, is a buffer solution. As we are using ours to maintain a pH level of approximately 7.4, we are creating an alkaline buffer solution, which is made of a weak base and one of its salts.

The primary role of a balanced salt solution is to maintain pH and osmotic balance, as well as to provide cells with water and essential inorganic ions. Specifically, PBS is generally used for short-term maintenance of cells/tissues in a viable condition when they are manipulated outside of their regular growth environment. When we slice tissues from the rat brain, we will place them in PBS so that they maintain their condition and we can later mount them onto microscope slides. 

Surgeries and experimentation take place as normal this week. Please see Week Three and Week Five for further details regarding preparation for surgery and experimentation. This week, we have a different experiment running. We are aiming to determine rat positional behavior when presented with stimulus, whether temperature-inducing medication or exposure to extreme temperatures. This week, we are trapping each rat in a different area of the thermogradient: two are trapped in cold-end, two in hot-end, and two in the middle. We are trying to determine what behavioral changes occur within the rats when they are exposed to a set temperature for 30 minutes, and then are released and enabled to roam freely within the temperature gradient.