Week 6: Timing is Everything
Welcome back to Week 6 of my blog! This week was extremely packed with testing for my Novel Object Discrimination Pilot. I received new mice, 3 for a 24-hour inter-session interval (ITI), 3 for a 1-hour ITI, and 8 for a 30-minute ITI. This means there was a lot of overlap in my testing, so I want to walk everyone through my week of how I scheduled this.
Monday
I arrive at the lab before Marisa gets here, and since she has to go get the mice from another mouse room that I do not have access to, I spend this day finishing up manual scoring of last week’s testing.
Tuesday
As of Tuesday, I had only received 4 of my 30-minute ITI mice, so I started the Day 1 habituation with them. (Here’s a small recap on the testing phases: Day 1- Habituation, Day 2- Familiarization, Day 2/3- Test Session. For more details, please view my week 4 blog or this Jove Article that I used to formulate the steps.)
Wednesday
I started with Day 1 habituation for the 24-hour ITI mice and completed Day 2 familiarization and test session for the 30-minute ITI that I started yesterday.
Thursday
I first did Day 1 habituation with the 1-hour ITI mice. Then I completed Day 2- familiarization with the 24-hour ITI mice. In order for my schedule to line up on Friday, I waited a bit and then did Day 1 habituation with the last 4 30-minute ITI mice.
Friday
This is the busiest day of the week. I completed Day 3 Test Session with the 24-hour ITI mice and all the testing of the 1-hour and 30-minute ITI mice. During each trial, I was continuously washing the arenas so that they would be ready for the next set of testing, and I could not be late in starting a trial, as it would mess up the ITI time.
Next Up
All the testing I did this week and prior weeks was done using C57BL/6J mice. This is a commonly used strain of mice used in research. Next week, I will start testing PdgfraCre; Tbx1 flox/+ mice. Using the data from the C57BL/6J mice as a constant, I can compare the PdgfraCre; Tbx1 flox/+ mice data to test if Tbx1 plays a role in oligodendrocyte precursor cells. I will continue to explain the new strain of mice in my next blog! Thank you for reading!
References
Denninger, J. K., Smith, B. M., & Kirby, E. D. (2018). Novel Object Recognition and Object Location Behavioral Testing in Mice on a Budget. Journal of Visualized Experiments, (141). https://doi.org/10.3791/58593.
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