Diana King, Week #1.5, Nerves and Frustration

6/14- 6/23

My first week and a half has now come to an end at the Froemke Lab at Tish Hospital in NY. Almost every experience I have had so far has been a new one but I have tackled each new thing successfully so far.

First is traveling in NY alone and using public transport to commute there, both of which are new to me. I usually get into the lab at around 10 - 10:30 which means I have to leave the house at about 8:45. I take the 9:10 train from Princeton Junction to New York Penn Station, then take a bus from there to a block from the hospital (although I will walk if the weather is nice). It takes me about an hour and 20 min total to get from home to the lab. It is one thing to think about the commute in theory but another to actually do it every day. I am realizing this now...

Thankfully my Grad student has been very lenient with the time that I come in.

It is a small lab with 13 people: 8 grad students, 1 postdoc, 2 undergrads, and 2 high school students (me included). I am working with a grad student, Jenn Schiavo, on her project concerning the behavior and learning of virgin mice when cohoused with maternal mothers. Over the school year, I mostly studied the effects of oxytocin on maternal mice but this project has mostly been focused on the auditory cortex and learning in virgin mice. This is not exactly what I prepared for but it is still related and of interest to me.

The project consists of observing the virgin mice, after being cohoused with a maternal mother, of their reactions over time to pups of different ages. We observe the effects both behaviorally and in the brain. This is where neuron imaging becomes useful.

I was able to watch Jenn image and record the activity in the auditory cortex of the virgin mouse we were analyzing. The laser microscope is in an extremely dark and cold room apart from the main lab. The mouse is strapped into the machine under the laser which is connected to a monitor next to it. First, she clipped in the mouse by the metal rods that were attached to its head and then placed a water based gel over the area we would be imaging. The laser is able to detect the fluorescent molecules that travel through the synapses when the excitatory neurons are activated. Pup calls of different ages were played back to the virgin as well as pure tones and the firing of neurons in that area was recorded.

This information will be used to determine how the brain goes about learning this maternal instinct and will address the process of learning in general.

I also witnessed a surgery on a mouse. In order to view that part of the brain, there needs to be an open window directly to the cortex. So in all of these mice is a 3 mm glass window inserted into the skull. I could not take pictures of the surgery due to animal rights laws.


Jenn essentially drilled a 3 mm circle in the mouse's skull and then replaced that piece of bone with glass. This time she used a much younger mouse for the surgery, which gives it a much lower chance of survival but it seems to have gone well and she was breathing well after coming off of the anesthesia.

This week I have mostly watched what Jenn was doing but I have also done a bit of my own work. The pup calls that are being projected to the mice all need to be measured and analyzed to determine the differences in acoustic structure from various ages. My job has been to measure and record the structure of these different pup calls. When I have enough data points I will make a hypothesis about how the call correlates to the age of the pups.


This has been a long 1.5 weeks but I am looking forward to the remaining time I have in the lab