Defrosted Fish Can Give Up Their Brains

Sounds weird, but it's true. On Tuesday we ran a dress rehearsal for removing brains from freshly defrosted fish. We defrosted a small telescope shiner from our collection at Estill Fork on Oct. 4. It only took two minutes for the fish to be flexible, as good a sign as any of defrosting. It was 25.5 mm long, and it took Brittany about 5 minutes to make a clean removal of the brain. The brain was kinda mushy, certainly compared to formaldehyde-fixed brain, but it came out in one piece. We were able to weigh it, at about 0.01 gram out of a total fish mass of about 0.2 g. So the brain is roughly 5% of somatic mass, consistent with what we've seen in scarlet shiners.

Our plan is to stage a brain dissecting party in the lab next Thursday afternoon. We have frozen Estill Fork fish from both Oct. 4 and Oct. 25. We have to quickly defrost a fish, weigh and measure it, remove the brain, weigh the brain, and immediately place it in a tube of lysis buffer on ice. We're doing this to assay the brains for the cellular protein NMDA via Western blot, so we don't want any protein degradation before the tissue hits the buffer. We have no idea of what to expect for NMDA levels in juvenile brains compared to adults, I'm not sure anyone has ever tried this with juvenile fishes compared to adults.

I hope that everyone has recovered from the elections. I'm happy with the results, I sure as hell hope you are too!