My First Summer in the Lab: Social Isolation, DHM, and the Brain

The study

A repeated social isolation model in mice, asking what isolation does across three domains at once — anxiety-like behaviour, cognition, and social behaviour — and whether dihydromyricetin (DHM) changes the picture.

Broadly, the work involved:

• A repeated social isolation mouse model
• 2 mg/kg dihydromyricetin
• Anxiety-like behaviour
• Cognition
• Social behaviour
• Sex-specific effects in male and female mice
• Partial amelioration by DHM

Citation

Watanabe, S., Cai, J., Zhou, A., Guo, A., Ni, D., Talamas, R., & Liang, J. Impacts of repeated social isolation and dihydromyricetin on anxiety, cognition, and social behavior in male and female mice: a pilot study. Poster presented at the 21st Annual World Congress of the Society for Brain Mapping and Therapeutics, Los Angeles, CA, March 14–17, 2024.

What the first summer was actually like

I joined this project during my first summer of research after eighth grade. I learned and performed behavioral-assay work, followed wet-lab protocols and record-keeping procedures, and helped keep the student team organized as the study progressed.

It was my first experience seeing how an experimental question becomes a protocol, a dataset, a poster, and eventually a conference abstract.