Thesis Blues

In about 5 weeks I am going to be leaving the world of grad school here at U of I and entering the world of medical school at SIU. So, before I leave I figure I need to put together a checklist to make sure I have fulfilled all of the requirements for my masters program. Here it is:

All required coursework = check!
Enough research to almost constitute a PhD project = check!
Too much time in the mouse house feeding, weighing, dissceting, cleaning cages, and watching mice exercise on a treadmill = check!
5 semesters of TAing exercise physiology classes = check!
Completed thesis = NOT FINISHED!

Completing a thesis project and writing a thesis is a huge undertaking. Although I have done about 14 different mouse experiments, I did not happen to even start on my thesis project until earlier this year. In my thesis experiments I am looking to see if 4-weeks of voluntary wheel running in mice is able to attenuate the sickness and depressive-like behaviors that they experience after injection with a bacterial endotoxin. This is prevelent because many chronic diseases and cancer treatments lead to an increase in inflammation and patients develop depressive symptoms. We hope that exericse can have antidepressant and anti-inflammatory effects in the mice we are studying. The actual experiment took 4 weeks and I had to repeat it one time to get enough mice per group to hopefully see significant findings. Since my experiment has been finished, I have been working like a mad women trying to do data analysis. A large part of my results section is looking a gene expression in brain tissue. This is done by doing 3 very boring and long steps. First there is the RNA isolation from the brain tissue, then the reverse transcriptase reaction to make cDNA from the RNA, then the RT-PCR procedure to detect mRNA levels. I have done the first 2 steps on 48 brain samples, now I am trying to do the RT-PCR. If I ever finish this, I will finally be one step closer to finishing my thesis. Lets just say it is hard to collaborate with people from different lab groups and using reagents and equipment that belongs to other people. It is so hard to organize everything and try to finish it on time. Okay, enough with the rant on the impossibility of me finishing data analysis. Please watch this silly video on PCR which probably only nerdy scientist types will laugh at - but it really did cheer me up. http://bio-rad.cnpg.com/lsca/videos/ScientistsForBetterPCR/

I will keep you posted on the status of my thesis!