Alright – a day in the life at the Mooney Lab. First off, I’d like to say that there isn’t really one “typical” day or set routine in the lab. The day pretty much depends on the experiments you want to conduct that day, or if you have to continue procedures related to previous experiments you conducted earlier. That being said, I’ll do my best to give a good picture of what my day is like in the lab.
I typically arrive at 9:30 AM or 10:30 AM (depending if I have BSURF-related activities beforehand). Once there, I usually have a quick meeting with my PhD candidate mentor, Jiaxuan, about anything I need to complete that day, throughout the week, or for my summer project in general. If she doesn’t have any specific tasks for me to do at that moment, the day is really up to me. Sometimes, I go to my desk and read papers related to the research at Mooney Lab (Jiaxuan and I meet weekly for a small journal club). Other times, I simply do work not necessarily related to my project, but to the fields of neurobiology and neuroscience in general. However, most often, I’m practicing the different procedures and protocols necessary to conduct my project.
My project requires me to conduct an injection surgery on zebra finches. Essentially, it is a minimally invasive operation in which I open small sections of the skull in order to access different regions of the zebra finch’s brain. Then, using a variety of equipment, tools, and measurements, I inject a variety of substances into the brain. For the purposes of practicing, I typically inject “red beads” – a fluorescent dye that can be easily distinguished under a confocal microscope (as well as the naked eye). These surgeries typically last around 3-5 hours (depends on how many injections need to be conducted).
Other procedures that I am currently getting the hang of are, for example, perfusions (the process of replacing the blood of a sacked organism with preserving chemicals) and immunostaining (the process and use of different antibodies and reagents to stain brain tissues). Between conducting these different protocols, reading papers, and getting a better grasp of neurobiology in general, my days are usually kept quite busy. Typically, my day ends at around 5 PM (but again, science sometimes requires working strange hours!).
