Week 2: From Mice to Metrics
Welcome back to Week 2 of my blog! I hope everyone had a restful and fun spring break!
This week I started with the main goal of finishing the HMGB1 analysis of the LA data I mentioned last week. To refresh on what this is, HMGB1 is one group of mice that is tested and LA is one type of test they undergo. These are the steps I take to complete the analysis:
- I start by looking through the LA folder for files that have the name HMGB somewhere in the title.
LA Files Folder - I download them once I find them.
- I open the downloaded file on Med Associates, which is the program that allows me to pull the data from those files.
- In the pulled data, one column should indicate the Mouse ID and another the date the test took place. Using this date, I go to another Excel sheet called “HMGB Mouse Records. ”
- As the name implies, it contains records of each HMGB mouse’s sex, date of birth, injection type, testing timeline, date of death, etc.
- I find the corresponding ID and look at its testing timeline to figure out if the date falls into its 1-month period or 2-month period.
- Once I know what month the data is for, I open either my LA 1-month Excel sheet or LA 2-month Excel sheet.
- I had already set up these sheets to have 3 different pages. One that focuses on ambulatory distance, one that focuses on time spent on zone edge, and one that is the master sheet that contains all the data. I “premade” all the sheets using the Mouse Records so that I already know what mouse goes where.
- So I copy all the data I pulled from Med Associates and paste it into the master sheet in its corresponding row.
- From here, I can easily pick out the ambulatory distance and the time data to put on the other pages.
A new task I received was to manually score the time and frequency a mouse spent around the objects in the trials I recorded last week. To do this, I had to create my own scoring sheet that would work for me.
This week all I did was practice doing this, so I printed the sheet out and using a metronome, to standardize my counting, I watched a trial recording. Every time the mouse had its nose facing the object and was within a 1 cm distance of it, I would mark it down.
That’s all for this week everyone, thank you for reading!
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