I just arrived here in San Diego after three days preliminary experiments in my old lab in Houston, Texas. I'm trying to use voltage sensitive dyes to make neural activity visible in Aplysia ganglia. So far things look promising, but with a rather large room for improvement.
I'm doing the experiments in Bill Kristan's lab at UCSD in La Jolla. It's a leech (Hirudo medicinalis) lab and these little critters are absolutely cool animals! For instance, if they're feeding, they seem to shut down all sorts of sensory input (presumably to not so easily be shaken off of the host they're sucking the blood out of?), and you can do all sorts of experiments with the rest of the animal without it even noticing it! Check the extended body of this entry for some awesome leech pictures! They're from Quentin Gaudry, a graduate student here in the lab.

[ Read the rest ... ]