Lab Lab Lab

Recently I have been working in the lab constantly. Last week, I worked on the ROI imaging, coloring in the motor cortex areas of the brain and their symmetrical spots. This week, for both Tuesday and Wednesday, I have been dissecting two hefty articles. The first one discuses a new discovery in biomaterials. A group of researchers found that they could use a scaffold and look at BDNF's reactions and how it can harm and/or benefit the brain. The researchers found that the BDNF can affect the axons greatly, perhaps making them more dense. Also, the scaffold the researchers created was very efficient because it can be preserved easily, lasting a long time for reuse. Tomorrow Dr. Adkins and I are going to discuss the article and I have three questions to ask her with regards to this article- 1. How does a cystic lesion cavity compare to the lesions we have been studying? What is it exactly? Is it just bigger and less precise? 2. How is the scaffold inserted? 3. Generally, what are the axons? How do they work? Do they help send out a lot of signals to the brain, specifically the motor regions? The next article I read discussed the ROI imaging I'm working on and the recovery sensorimotor function after an experimental stoke. This article discussed a perspective that really interested, but confused me. When the brain is exposed to a high impact injury, it tries to compensate and restore what it might have lost or what might have been damaged, sometimes referred to as neural plasticity. This group of researchers experimented a case of 70 days monitoring the rats after the strokes and observing their reactions via images. I had a really hard time understanding this article due to all the complicated and new words. Thus, I have quite a handful of questions for Dr. Adkins- 1. Would watching them for this many days be beneficial? 2. How does the neuronal tract tracing work? 3. What are they looking at in the images to find answers? Linear Regression? How does that work? 4. How does the guy who looks at the images I draw judge them and extract answers from them? 5. Could strokes cause increased abilities in other parts of the brain? Could there potentially be benefits to strokes because they force other areas of the brain to compensate, but become stronger?