Work update

For those who are interested (others disregard, it's bound to get geeky up in here!):

I worked really hard for a few weeks on immunohistochemistry experiments, generating tissue for two separate projects. One, my dual immunofluorescence examination of the colocalization of VAT and CHT in limbic regions recipient of ascending mesopontine cholinergic innervation, had to have all the tissue processed in one big batch, which made for some particularly long days. But after a couple of weekends off and a few shortened week days, I'm back to business. I've started cleaning up/ organizing my files, and cross-referencing/cataloging the physical micrographs, image files, actual tissue, lab notes, sampling notes, and excel analysis files. It's a little daunting, because I've put off dealing with a lot of the unfinished projects, which generated a lot of data, but is hard to classify. But, I inventoried two lab notebooks last night, and I'll probably spend a day or two this week burning secondary back-up CDs.

Then, maybe, I can be done with this project. Finally.

I moved forward with my dual fluorescence project today, when a really nice grad student showed me the post-processing steps to use on my image stacks. I still need to spend some time playing with the masking procedure to identify objects as sets of voxels, but I think this will be a good way to do this project. I'm really grateful to the professor who's helping me do these experiments (and letting me use his imaging system), and to the student who helped me today.

My tract-tracing project is moving a little bit farther as well. I got an analyzable case, and I have the slides prepared, and took some low magnification shots of a far-red fluorescent dye called Alexa-647, that labeled the vesicular acetylcholine transporter (VAT). I had to paste these together in Photoshop, as the 2x image wasn't big enough to cover the entire section.

So tomorrow evening, I'll start sampling 20x triple fluorescence images. This is A--- 488 for green fluorescent latex microspheres, A--- 568 for CTxB, and A--- 647 for VAT. So far, on a quick scan, I haven't seen much colocalization of the tracers, and I haven't found anything yet that had all three labels. But I looked at very rostral sections, where inputs to the AVN aren't very heavy.

So... maybe six months? I'll bet eight ;)

On that front, I'm going to send resumes/CVs/coverletters to whatever jobs interest me, and see where that takes me. It's a strange way for me to do a job search, I'm used to taking whatever comes up first because I need the money, and not-so-secretly hate being without a job. So wish me luck with all of that, and hopefully I'll love my next career move.