Meet Daria

One of the most exciting and rewarding aspects of my project is validating that one of the viruses I injected to target a population of neurons worked.

For many of the experiments I’m currently working on, I use chemogenetics to activate or inhibit the neuron population I’m studying. This involves injecting a virus into the mouse brain via stereotaxic injection and then running different experiments with the animals that I’ve injected.

Image of NK3R neurons in the medial amygdala that were injected with an AAV9-mCherry-hM3Dq virus. Image taken at 40x. 

When doing this type of work, you don’t actually know if the virus you’ve injected into the brain actually infected the cells you were targeting until after completing all of the experiments or tests that you were planning to do with these animals. Therefore, there is always the possibility that after all the work you’ve put into these experiments that you may not be able to include the data in your study if when you finally look at the brain the cells weren’t infected.

So you can imagine how incredible it feels to see your target cells light up under the microscope after a couple of months of work with your experimental animals. Seeing the screen light up with positive cells is the best feeling!

Image of Daria looking at samples under the fluorescent microscope.