Samantha Mohammad

Blog #1 The Beginning of My MARC Madness

     Hello there and Happy 4^th of July! So I am finishing up my first two weeks of the UCLA MARC Program and I must admit, I think I love it. I have been working in the Mody lab since November 2011, but I was not too crazy about my project. I have always been really interested in epilepsy research because I have a brother who suffers from severe epilepsy, but they had me working on a completely unrelated project until this summer. I have received a new project where I get to work with mice and study the effects of physical exercise on epilepsy susceptibility. I find my project so interesting, and there are so many different viewpoints to look at. My project seems to be growing with every week, even though last week I was mainly doing background research to make sure I understood my project.

A quick more in depth version of my project:

There is a region known as the dentate gyrus which is one of very few regions within the brain which produces newly born granule cells (GCs). It is a known fact that physical exercise reduces ones susceptibility to epileptic attacks but it is unknown exactly how and why. At the Mody lab we are trying to prove that it is because exercise increases the production of immature GCs. To prove this we will have control mice, and mice that have been running, and compare these to transgenic mice without the ability to produce newly-born GCs. Each mouse will be given a drug to cause epileptogenesis and their seizure levels will be scored and compared. We have added another component to prove that running produces more GCs by the addition of histology to the project to stain for immature GCs. I am genuinely excited about my project and to see how the results pan out.

 

Here is a picture of our PFA hood. I overlooked one of the graduate students as she taught me a fixation perfusion method for histology.

This is the rig I used to work on during my old project which was an electrophysiology project. It was very confusing and very intimidating! (despite the cat above the electrodes.

Blog #2
 
Hey again! So these past few weeks have been really busy. I learned to cut on the cryostat which is not too hard but can get pretty tricky due to temperature changes. For those of you that don’t know, a cryostat is used to cut brain slices for histological analysis on microscopes. I am going to be staining for BrdU in my brain samples. BrdU gets incorporated into the DNA of newly born hippocampal granule cells. So I am staining the brain slices to prove that lower amounts of seizures and lower seizures severity corresponds to the lack of newly born granule cells. DNMT mice are not expected to have any newly born granule cells so this will also be a good way to make sure that this holds true for the DNMT mice we have been using for our study since the stain should not have any success.

Back to my original point. Before I can do any of these stains I had to learn to cut my slices. First I perfused the animals which I got to practice my first 2 weeks.

After that I moved onto the cryostat, which gets tricky due to slight changes in temperature as I said previously. This is because if the cryostat is too cold the slices will fold over onto themselves and will become ruined. If the cryostat is too hot the slices will stick to just about any/everything which makes it increasingly difficult to place them in the antifreeze which is where we keep our slices until we are ready to stain them.

I hope to start staining by the end of the summer but the grad students in my lab have told me that BrdU stains are extremely difficult and since I have no previous experience with staining it may be a while before I get to that point.

Blog #3: Weeks 5-6

                So as the weeks have passed I’ve come to get a much better understanding of what research is really like. It’s a lot of patient waiting and a lot of times things do not go exactly how you wanted them to. My experiment has been put on hold due to a lack of new mice. By that I mean I can’t continue forward with beginning new experiments such as testing the DNMT mice, which will have to wait until Fall quarter starts since the new born DNMT mice will not become adults until sometime late September.  In the meantime, between experiments, I have been doing some old field recordings.

                During the school year when I used to do the field recordings, I used to have my mentor prepare everything, but now that I have my DLAM certification for my animal training completed he wanted me to try my best to complete everything on my own. This entailed making new solutions as well as sacrificing the mice. This is the machine used to prepare the slices, and then they are kept on a water bath until they are ready to use.

 

 I learned to prepare the slices for extracellular field recordings, and I am pretty pleased with how much progress I have made as my slices seem to be much better. Unfortunately there are a lot of other things I needed to learn to do on my own such as making electrodes which is done in the back of our lab where we have a little woodshop-like area. I think it’s a really great experience learning how to actually go about making your own devices, so if ever something breaks or goes wrong I will actually be able to deal with it on my own.

Blog #4

Hey everyone! So as it happens I had forgotten to do some old scoring using the Racine scale which gave me a little more project related things to do. Basically I will watch the mice given Kainate undergo status epilepticus for 4 hours and score them once every 5 minutes scoring them based on their most severe seizure.

MARC also kept me busy analyzing my data making graphs for my results and writing up my abstract. It’s weird to think the school year is right around the corner again, which I am both looking forward to and regretting since I am really afraid of starting my core Neuroscience classes.

On a brighter note, I am half Palestinian, and have observed Ramadan since about 3^rd grade. This whole month of August I have been fasting from sunrise to sunset. I missed a few days but am still proud of how much I actually completed this year, especially on days where I’d work out because no water and working out leads to a very exhausted Samantha. Once the month of fasting is over though, there is a holiday called the Eid. Unfortunately, my parents found a great opportunity to go to Vegas while all of my siblings came home to celebrate so that they could take a much needed vacation while we took care of our autistic/epileptic brother Kimi. A couple of us just decided to go to dinner and we all celebrated at home.