it happened

Hello everyone! It's Maya again. So this week started off interestingly enough. Monday, I was mostly writing and reading/becoming familiar with procedures that I would do later in the week and discussing with Brandy, one of the people working at the lab with me, when we would receive the mice for the project. Tuesday, we carried out the beginning of a procedure I had been investigating the day before, to extract DNA from mice tails. Wednesday, I played guitar for all of you (yay what fun!) and finished the procedure. Thursday, I didn't do very much. I counted cells and talked with Brandy about summer plans. Then, on friday, it happened. We finally disected the mouse, which wasn't particularly drastic, but I had been dreading it for quite some time. I may sound like a pansy, but honestly, I'm not particularly psyched about the whole surgery gig, so watching my mentor TV cut the crap out of a mouse wasn't the most amazing thing in the world. In the whole procedure, we extracted the spleen, the kidneys, the brain, the testes, and bones for bone marrow. The bone marrow test did not work due to excess fat on the bones increasing the inability to strip the bones clean. We executed the kidney and spleen tests and will carry on with those on Monday when we will, yet again, disect another mouse, of which I will have pictures! Well that's all for now!

Cheers!