The Animal Communication and Neuroscience Lab (ACN) is run by Dr. Marcela Fernandez-Peters. The ACN studies the effects of estradiol, or a drug that blocks the synthesis of estradiol in the brain, on auditory discrimination in noise and on dendritic spine plasticity. Students who work in this lab have learned to perfuse and extract brains of zebra finches; perform histological protocols to stain the tissue and measure spine density or activity using immunohistochemistry; and tale images at high magnification and do 3D reconstructions of dendrites to count spines to study plasticity.