Cory Knox - Dr. Conor Liston - WK4

After meeting with Dr. Liston and Shane (post doc) about a research pivot for my summer plans, Shane and I shifted into a long week of surgeries. Every day we were tackling 5-6 mouse surgeries total, which includes a small craniotomy that would be the AAV injection site into the insula, followed by fiber optic implantation just above and head plate installation for future head fixation. Due to a shift in summer plans, my new work will be focused around helping Shane collect supplementary data to support his upcoming publication. In addition to all the surgeries, I am helping the Liston lab set up their own Learned Helplessness behavior rig, a behavioral assay they have yet to do here at WCMC. Back in the Kwan lab, learned helplessness is a heavily used behavioral assay, so I was able to contribute to the set up greatly, along with assay planning and troubleshooting. 

In addition to my work with Shane, I checked in with Kenneth (graduate student) to see how my prism implants healed and whether he was able to image dendritic spines from the troubleshooting notes we discussed. Excitingly, he was able to capture spines off of all our prism implant mice! The notes I shared with him apparently helped and we are continuing to discuss experiment parameters around long-term spine imaging. I was happy to hear that my previous work has come in handy for others. This is doubly exciting as we were able to image into deeper layers of the brain compared to what I would do back in Ithaca. 

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