An Exotic Experiment by Maha Vijayakrishnan

For my independent project, I have been experimenting with the exotic bitter gourd, which hails from Kerala, India. I want to test its effects on the microbiome and am hoping to see a significant positive result in gut health. Making the gut healthier can ameliorate a lot of health problems or help prevent potential diseases in humans such as diabetes or colon cancer. In order to analyze the gut for flies, I must perform a microbiome assay, where I swab their digestive systems onto an agar plate and count the number of different colonies that result from their diet.

To prepare for this, I created 4 experimental conditions in terms of what I am injecting in the fly’s food: bitter gourd juice only, sugar only, bitter gourd and sugar, and a control condition. I had to dilute the serving sizes with water since a fly’s serving size is way smaller than a human’s. 

However, not everything went as smoothly as I had hoped it to. First of all, a major setback I have experienced is smashing the bitter gourd into juice in the first place. The fruit/vegetable (it can be classified as either) turned out to be drier than I expected it to be! It was hard to smash it into juice, so I tried the best I could with a mortar and pestle. The bitter gourd mostly infused into the water, which thankfully made it easier to put into the fly food.