Hello everyone.
I'm here today about my summer interning
at a neuroanatomy and behavior lab at Northeastern University
under the mentorship of Dr. Rebecca Shanksy.
So just to give you some brief background into neuroscience
and the types of regions we were looking at-- what we focused on
was this fear circuit here, which
you'll notice that there are neural projections going
through the prefrontal cortex, down to the amygdala
and vice versa.
Also notice the connections to the hypothalamus,
which is important for memory consolidation.
And on [? the cumber ?] side, there's
very a related pathway called the mesolimbic pathway,
also as the reward pathway, and this also
involves having projections from the ventral tegmental area
to the TFC, back to the amygdala,
and it all kind of connects in a circuit.
The VTA in particular is important,
because there are dopaminergic neurons that
produce a lot of dopamine, which is
a very important hormone for a lot
of different normal processes.
So then Shansky Lab's main research focus
was to look at these neural connections
between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala,
and specifically to see what sorts of sex differences
there are and how this circuit processes fear in response
to stressful situations.
So one of her main research questions was to look at,
how do hormones such as estrogen modulate
dopamine actions in the MPFC, and how can this affect
memory of a traumatic event?
Some of some techniques that the lab used--
but I didn't necessarily work with all of them--
was that they used confocal microscopy
and immunofluorescence to basically visualize
neurons illuminate them so you can look at them.
And these are some of the pictures they got.
They're really pretty.
You can see the dendrites, the axon here, the dendrites
all extending out.
And though I didn't get to do that,
it was a really cool thing to watch them do.
The also used a CPhos, which is a basically indirect marker
for looking at neuronal activity.
But what I focused on was correlating
this structural information with behavioral measures
to identify potential markers of resilience and vulnerability.
So I've been talking about all this stuff,
but why does this matter to us in the real world?
What possible applications could this have?
So the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala
are frequently reported to be sites of dysfunction
in stress-related mental illnesses
such as major depressive disorder and PTSD.
So the field has kind of hypothesized
that this may be the result of abnormal crosstalk
between the two regions I was talking about.
And it's important because women are also twice as likely as men
to develop these disorders, and surprisingly the National
Institutes of Health finally-- only just required
scientists who do animal research to include
both sexes and their studies.
And this can be bad, because you're
looking, say, to test a drug, and you only
test it in male animals, when you could translate that
to humans, a lot of times the doses don't work out very well
and there are other adverse effects.
Women experience higher rates of average drug reactions
than men do.
So some of the daily responsibilities
I did in the lab was a mix of daily lab maintenance,
I made a lot of stock solutions and a lot
of [? paraphernelkai ?] I also monitored
t the rat estrous cycle, which is what it these pictures
are showing.
It's similar to menstrual cycles in humans,
but it's a little bit different.
It's only about four day, and it just
basically shows when they are in periods of high estrogen
progesterone.
And how you do that is you take a swab,
and you look at their cells underneath the microscope,
and you just kind of look and you're like,
"Oh, this is estrous, because the cells look like that."
And then one of my biggest things
that I did this summer was that I did an independent research
project with another undergrad running behavioral assays
like the forced swim test, and running for profusions
and doing brain extractions.
So my main research focused this summer
was to look at the sex differences in these activities
active versus passive fear responses to a stressful event.
So the main question we pursued was, "Do female rats
exhibit more active fear behaviors than males when
in a stressful situation?"
And we hypothesized that these females, based
on previous research lab had done
and different tests, that they would exhibit more active fear
behaviors as opposed to the passive ones.
So the types of rats we used were Sprague Dawleys
and Long-Evans.
They had done some previous research with that,
and we have to talk about why we used them later.
So the assay we used this test called
the forced swim test, which I know sounds really terrible,
but it's just basically you put them
in a cylinder full of water and they swim around
for 15 minutes, and then we take them out.
So for analysis, I used a mix of hand-scoring and an automated
computer software called [? Ethogan ?] to automatically
track their movement.
It's a really cool software, so that
tell us basically how much time were they spending swimming
versus just kind of floating there.
So this is some of our preliminary data
that my PI actually just send to me, so it's very exciting.
But we haven't done a lot of analysis on it.
So on the Y-axis you have percent, time, and activity
and all the X-axis you have the two different strains of rats.
So basically, the Long-Evans rats-- their data was weird,
due to a mix of issues we had in detecting their movement,
and also just possibly they're just
differnt than Sprague Dawleys.
Because in the first test-- we ran the forced swim test twice,
about a month apart.
And the female Long-Evans rats had more inactivity time
than the males.
Then it switched during the second test.
But the Sprague Dawley data was really great.
The males spent way more time being inactive in the test than
compared to the females, and this was the case even
in the second time.
So we're really glad that we had this good idea
that the females are-- they tend to be struggling more,
they're swimming more, and perhaps
that indicates a difference in how they
respond to fearful situations.
So reflecting back on my internship experience,
I really enjoyed working in a lab setting, even
more that I thought I would.
I have a better idea of my career path.
As cool as it was to work in an academic setting,
I think I want to pursue careers in industry, just
in a different sense the different types of research
you can do and also the different focuses
of the research.
I also learned to face rejection,
because when I was applying, I probably
sent out dozens of emails to labs,
and I got about four responses.
Two were nos and two were yeses, so I would just
really encourage everyone to just
apply to anything that interests you
and just kind of hope for the best.
But you have to learn to face that initial rejection.
I also learned to troubleshoot work
through a lot of these problems, because with the software
we were using there were a lot of times something wasn't quite
working now right.
We had to try something new if something in the lab
wasn't-- you know, we couldn't like, "Oh,
where do we get cylinders?
Oh I don't know, let me just go Google it really quickly,"
that type of thing.
And I'm also really grateful to Mount Holyoke for providing me
with a lot of the skills and knowledge-- base knowledge
that I got out of everything that I did.
I didn't necessarily know how to do something with a profusion
or how to make paraformaldehyde a lot,
but I was really grateful that I was
able to learn it very quickly.
I was able to capitalize on this opportunity.
So this is my lab.
We wanted-- we have to get dim sum.
That's Dr. Shanksy, right there.
That's the grad student, Tina, and the other undergrad, Jose,
that lab tech who was only there for a week,
so I can't remember his name, but [LAUGHTER] he's there.
I'd also like to thank Professor Jared Schwartzer here,
because the work I did in his lab
really helped me, which I worked with mice instead of rats.
Personally, rats are way better, I think.
But I really learned a lot from him,
and I'm really grateful for everything
that he's mentored me through.