Rotation #3

So, here’s Nathan’s “what’s Andy doing in his rotation this time” blog posting (i.e. he’ll be the only one to comment because no one else cares…). Regardless, I’m working in Dr. Scott Zahm’s lab in the Pharmacology and Physiology department until the end of this semester. He works with neuroanatomy in rats, generally trying to “map out” sections of the brain that are integral to motivation and, consequently, motor skills. By “motivation,” I mean a lot of things. For example, he is currently focusing on the Ventral Tegmental Area (VTA) in the rat brain, which is involved in motor function. More specifically, consider this: when we’re hungry, we have a few different competing ideas going through our brain, one of which is “where do I get food” and the other is “how do I survive while I try to get this food” (self-preservation). Our VTA works in concert with other parts of the brain to weigh each competing idea and then control our “need” for things like food, warmth, TV, drugs, whipped cream, etc.

Zahm, et al. are working to map the neurons that come in and go out of the VTA (and other structures) in the rat brain. Specifically, they want to better understand the brain “circuits” and how something that is signalled in one part of the brain can signal another part of the brain. They do this using “tracers” that can label neurons in a certain area (injected into the rat’s brain…) and then the neurons take up the tracer and transport it to other areas of the brain.

The cool pharmacological part of this is two-fold. First, his lab deals with reward systems. So, if you are taking a drug and you become addicted to it, you’ll have more motivation to try and get that drug back. The drug itself could completely rearrange different neurons in your brain as well, connecting something to the VTA that wasn’t connected before (thereby leading to addiction). This leads into the second part: we don’t know how the brain works, but perhaps more importantly, we don’t know how a lot of drugs (like Prozac) really work… The brain needs to be mapped so we know where things happen, what’s connected to what, and how a change in one area can affect transmission to another area. My interests in neuropharmacology are somewhat contingent on this fact…you can’t effectively develop new drugs unless you know how the brain is set up. We’ve found lots of drugs that have an effect…but we don’t necessarily know why… We could be prescribing drugs for ADHD that are “re-mapping” the brain of our children and not really know it… This research, and studies like it, will help us better understand how the brain is set up and how a drug can affect its organization.

As far as what I personally am doing, it’s relatively small stuff. So far, I’ve worked with putting brain sections on slides, staining brain sections with antibodies, seen the surgeries for injection of tracer into the brain and, consequently, the brain’s removal. Starting tomorrow, I’ll work on the actual mapping using light microscopes (and electron microscopes, eventually…) to take a look at the neurons and see where they go.

Nifty, eh?