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Pre-Lab Procedures. IMPORTANT!!!

1. Starting at dinner the night before lab, please attempt to consume a “normal” amount of liquid, and try not to intake unusual amounts of caffeine or alcohol. Record what you eat and drink starting at dinner the night before your lab.

2. Do not drink or eat anything but water during the 2-hour period before lab. (thus, either eat a late breakfast or have lunch before 11:30 AM). You may drink as much water as you wish.

3. Urinate one hour before coming to lab (note the time). Do not urinate again until the first collection at the beginning of laboratory.

4. If you have circulatory problems, poor kidney function or have any medical condition related to diet, do not volunteer as a subject for this experiment.

After completion of the lab, please fill out the spreadsheet below that corresponds to your assigned treatment.

Urinalysis Lab Data Spreadsheet

We will be measuring our brain waves using an EEG.  Please read the following studies published in Nature in preparation for lab next week: Nature Papers

In addition, please bring earbuds/headphones to lab and compile a list of songs (3 familiar and 3 unfamiliar).

EEG Lab Protocol

• Organize it around a question
  • develop a strong hypothesis with good intellectual content potential
  • Look up background information in your book about the physiological mechanisms you are interested in and what is already known about them
• Design the experiment thinking about the best treatments and controls to isolate your factors of interest
• Think about potential outcomes and their implications – if you get pattern A it will mean X, if you get pattern B, it will mean Y, etc.
• Can you foresee any issues in coming to clear conclusions?
  • You might want to strengthen your hypothesis or adjust your experimental design
• Think about potential to develop your intellectual content by highlighting your hypothesis through the introduction, methods, results, and discussion — given your hypothesis, what are important points to hit?
• Maximize your intellectual merit by writing to convince the reader that your study is important, useful and compelling.

We will explore the contractile properties of skeletal muscle in the next two labs. For Lab 8, you will follow the protocol and experiments listed below (Parts 1-6) and submit a group lab, and for Lab 9 you will do an independent experiment and writeup.  

Be thinking about what you might explore further and come up with a good testable hypothesis for your independent lab.  Get your independent hypothesis approved by your TA before you leave lab this week (see manual for more details).

Download the lab here

Lab 7-8 Toad Muscle Protocol

Here are some resources:

• Thigh and Shank muscles of the frog
• Ventral musculature (superficial)
• Dorsal musculature (superficial)
• Thigh and Shank muscles (another one)

For background, please watch the podcast on Muscle EMG — especially the motor control portion toward the end, and check out the reading:

Eckert ch. 10 (under the readings tab):  Mechanics of Muscle Contraction 375-379, Active State, Twitch and Tetanus 391- 392, Motor Control vertebrate 410 – 411

This is a group lab

Lab 6 protocol download

lab-6-emg-lab-protocol

This lab is very cool, we will be isolating the sciatic nerve to observe refractory periods and conduction velocity.

Download Lab 10

Toad Muscle and Nerve Dissection Guide

Please review the podcasts and notes from when we discussed nerves in class.

Look for discussion of Neuron Structure and Compound Action Potentials in the Synapses and Signal Propagation podcast at around 24:00.

Look for discussion of Refractory period in the Neurons podcast at around 23:00.

This will be our first invertebrate lab. We will be studying the control of the neurogenic heart of crustaceans using the lobster as a model.

Work quickly! You will have 30 min (and very lucky if you have an hour) once you open the carapace. Keep your animal chilled (they are Maine lobsters!) and irrigated with cold Lobster ringers at all times.

Please check out the powerpoint notes and the review paper on the crustacean cardiac ganglion by our very own Dr. Ian Cooke who was an emeritus faculty from the Zoology Department and PBRC, a pioneer in invertebrate neurophysiology!

6-heartcontrollobster

Lobster Heart Lab Manual

lab-5-revised-lobster-heart-lab-2015

The assignment for this week is a full group lab report. Please take what you have learned from the individual worksheet assignments and apply this to these reports. We will go over what our expectations will be for these reports in lab.

First live animal experiment, this one will be really cool.

Please look over the dissection guide in addition to the lab manual below. You must wear closed-toed shoes to participate.

This will be an individual worksheet assignment. Remember you may work together with your group members to generate figures, but the written portions must be your own.

Lab Manual

Dissection Guide

Toad Heart Worksheet

Heart-Anatomy

Please do the prelab in your notebook and do the prelab quiz on Laulima before class. This is an Individual Worksheet (IWS) lab, due next week.

This is a fun lab, where you will be able to collect an ECG on yourself — a print out of the electrical signals of your heart!

This week we will be looking at ECGs to further our understanding of the Cardiac Cycle. Think about how the heart works, breaking down what is happening at each component of the cycle. Please note the different types of parameters that are informative – pressure, electrical activity, volume, heart sounds, etc. and what they tell us.

Have fun and think about what kinds of hypotheses you can come up with to explain how your heart responds to exercise. Make sure you focus on physiological mechanisms (be specific!) and function. WHY are these things occurring?

Please watch this podcast and read through the lab manual posted below in preparation for lab this week:

Electrocardiogram Lab Manual

ECG Protocol

ECG Worksheet

In addition, we are providing some tables to help you with data collection this week:

ECG Data Table

We may be using the Vernier system. If so you can download the Vernier Graphical Analysis software to collect/visualize your data