Internship Project

Originally, I intended for my main internship project to be a series of hand drawn and detailed images/diagrams of human and rat brains with descriptions of what roles each section of the brains are in charge of as well as one art piece centered around the theme of brains. But as the days passed I decided to convert these diagrams into sets of drawings of both human and mouse brains to brighten up and help people working in the cryostat room, the room in which mouse brains are sliced and placed onto glass slides, and push them away as a side project. Instead my main project became assisting in an in situ hybridization. An in situ hybridization is a type of hybridization that uses a labeled complementary DNA, RNA, or modified nucleic acids strand (probe) to localize a specific DNA or RNA sequence in a portion or section of tissue (in this case it's brain tissue), or, if the tissue is small enough, in the entire tissue, in cells, and in circulating tumor cells. I assisted in preparing the slides with brains by putting them through multiple washes of ethanol, formaldehyde, chloroform, citrasolv, then I helped develop the slides in the dark room and placed cover slips on the slides and labeled them in order to be viewed and counted under a microscope. Counting involves a computer program called Grains, connected to a microscope, both Andres and I spent hours learning how to navigate through the brain slides and distinguish cells from non-cells. The question that was being asked during this hybridization was what happened when progesterone receptors were knocked out of the Kiss neuron in the brain. The results were that the females had impaired fertility rates, smaller litter size, and went through puberty earlier than normal. This data is important because it provides a clearer outline of the neuroendocrine and reproductive system working in mouse bodies, which in turn helps us figure out our own systems.

The side project I previously mentioned is a total of four drawings of both the human and mouse brains, each showcasing saggital and coronal sections. Given that the laboratory already has an atlas of the entirety of the mouse brain I decided not to include descriptions or labels on these drawings and intended for them to be used more as a visualization of the differences between humans and mice. In order to complete this project I closely observed my colleagues while they collected and cut brains as well as cutting brains myself, conducted my own research on brains, and looked through the atlases of mouse brains that they had stored in the laboratory as drawing references. Once I drew them, they were inked, colored, and hung on a wall in the cryostat room of the laboratory to give lab workers a closer look at brains and also brighten up the room.