Senior Project Week 3- Setting Up Lab Protocol and Beginning Dissections

This week marked the transition into hands-on lab work. Dr. Claus Peter Richter returned from the UK, and we started setting up the actual experimental workflow. Because there is an ongoing replication crisis in academic papers — i.e. the results of experiments and studies tend to be impossible to replicate — he provided me with a lab notebook to begin writing out the full protocol in as much detail as possible, to eliminate any human error, unrecorded bias, or anything that would undermine the replicability and therefore the validity of our results. I spent a couple days drafting it, focusing on the step-by-step process for dissection, maintaining the nerve in solution, and eventually recording signals. Writing it out made it clear where things were still vague and needed to be tested in practice. Once I had my method down, I made final preparations for dissection. I prepared a 10% ethanol and 90% Ringer’s solution to anesthetize the worms before dissection. Alongside that, I reviewed worm anatomy so I would have some idea of where the nerve cord sits relative to other structures.

On Wednesday afternoon, 100 red wriggler worms arrived. Thursday was my first attempt at dissection. It did not go well. I damaged the nerve and surrounding blood vessels pretty quickly and at one point realized I had the specimen oriented incorrectly, which made it much harder to identify what I was doing. Most of the process was trial and error.

That said, I did start getting more comfortable with the tools. Using forceps and scissors with any level of precision under the microscope is harder than expected, especially when trying to isolate something small and fragile like a nerve. Even just pinning the specimen properly takes practice.
Friday I was in Virginia for Science Olympiad state competition, so I was not in the lab, but the earlier part of the week was still useful. The main takeaway is that dissection is going to take repetition before it becomes consistent. Right now the focus is just getting to the point where I can reliably isolate the nerve without destroying it.

Next week, the goal is to improve dissection technique and start getting clean nerve samples that can actually be used for recording.