legionnaire

No one is grey on my friends list anymore! That rules.

I decided to take the apartment. Moving in at some point in May (I have a month overlap between the time when my lease runs out and my new lease starts, so I can take my time.) I'm betting that my current landlord tries to screw me out of both my deposit and my last month's rent - since I paid that up front. We'll see. Scumbags.

I've spent the last two days trying frantically to get some data from my electrophysiological experiments. I went to the lab yesterday with the conviction that I would not leave until I had gotten a decent recording. I sat there trying to patch a cell for 7 consecutive hours. Finally, all pissed off, barely paying attention, talking on the phone while doing it, I finally patched one. It was a really crappy recording though, so I didn't get much out of it. But at least I got something, so I went home vaguely satisfied.

I came back today and tried again - with better success. Patched several cells, took lots of data. Here's the problem though - there was very little going on at all. I was looking at a very specific type of neurotransmission in these experiments: spontaneous glutamatergic activity. Normally, nerves fire by propagating what's called an "Action potential" along the axon, which is basically an electrical charge that moves from one end of the cell to the other, and when it reaches the axon terminal, it causes a bunch of synaptic vesicles full of neurotransmitter to be released. This action potential propagation happens through what are called voltage-gated sodium channels. I won't elaborate because it's not that interesting. I blocked these channels by adding tetrodotroxin to my cells - this is the same toxin that blowfish make, to stop all action potentials from occurring. So now all of the activity that I saw was occurring at the axon terminal itself without any help from the cell. There's much less of it, but it's a fairly reliable measure of the likelihood of that cell to release neurotransmitter, so it's a useful measure. It also gives some information as to where the action is happening - the presynaptic cell or the postsynaptic cell, because you can determine the frequency of these events, and any change in the frequency has to be the result of the presynaptic cell. I can explain if people are really interested.

Glutamate is the major excitatory neurotransmitter in the brain - meaning when glutamate binds to its receptor, the ion channel opens up, allowing sodium ions to flow into the cell, where it creates an electrical current. I was able to just look at Glutamate because I used toxins for the either neurotransmitters to block them. So I isolated just this particular type of transmitter.

For whatever reason though, my cell cultures sucked this time around. I would sit there, staring at the screen for minutes without seeing anything happen. This is not normal. So I junked all of my cells and am using them to take pictures instead. Kind of a disappointment.

Something completely unrelated that I've noticed is that I seem to be on a streak with remembering my dreams, I can't remember the last time I had so many consecutive days where I remembered what I dreamt the night before. It's kind of cool, it's been almost three months of every day, remembering my dreams. Not sure how or why that is (though, like with most things, I have some ridiculous hypothesis,) but I'm not complaining.