As we start the THIRD week of TRIP (how has it been 3 weeks already??), we have just begun our independent experiments. The first two weeks consisted of lots of lectures and introductions to procedures to get the feel for it. Going into the program, I must say I was super confused and wasn’t sure whether or not I would be able to pull off an independent experiment, but after just two weeks I feel so much better about it! At the end of last week, we decided what our independent projects would be on, and I have decided to test the effect of artificial sweeteners such as Stevia and Splenda on flies’ fertility and gut microbiomes in comparison to natural cane sugar. I chose this topic because I had always grown up hearing my parents always tell me to eat healthy, whole, organic foods whenever possible. However, as I became involved in fitness in my teenage years, I discovered the concept of calories and how even though a food might be considered “healthy”, it may be extremely calorically dense. When someone tries to lose weight, their results ultimately come down from calories in vs calories out, no matter the supposed health benefits of a food. Thus, I discovered zero calorie options such as Splenda and Stevia to replace highly caloric foods such as normal sugar. However, after a while, I began to wonder if calories were really all that mattered when it came down to health. Health is so much more than just how much someone weighs – it includes their fertility, their gut health, and their overall health of their body systems. So, I wanted to see if there are any adverse side effects to cheating the calories of sugar. So far, my least favorite activity I think is sorting the flies, however I am going to have to sort many more because I am doing the female fertility assay. I find that it is the most tedious task and is often very difficult to decipher between sexes, but I know it is very necessary to continue with my project. Compared to my peers, I find it takes me longer to sort them, but by the end of the program, hopefully I can sort them faster than Dr. Leystra! As I began making my drug stocks, I realized I may have made them too diluted to see any results. I decided to test the effect of consuming the equivalent of one packet of each of my drugs would have on the flies, however I suspect that one packet may not be enough to see results. I’ll track my flies and see how it goes, and I can’t wait to see what I find out!
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Hi readers! I have greatly enjoyed my first couple weeks of TRIP. Over the past weeks, I have learned so much including basic laboratory procedures and even completed my introductory experiment on female fertility. The goal of my fertility experiment was to study the effects of fenugreek and constant darkness on female fertility. In order to accomplish this task, I created grape plates, which are basically small plates primarily made of grape juice and other chemicals that flies like to lay embryos on. Before I gave the flies these plates, I stressed the flies and put fenugreek in their food. After being exposed to these stressors, I had the females lay eggs on grape plates and then counted the number of embryos on each plate. From there, I calculated the average embryos laid by each female. A couple days after that, I counted the number of embryos that hatched. After analyzing this data, I determined that the fenugreek increased the number of embryos laid per female in addition to increasing the hatching rate. After gaining a basic understanding of the scientific process and how to conduct experiments with fruit flies, it was time to determine my independent project that I would focus on for the rest of the summer session. After much thought, I decided upon my research questions: Can exercise make up for a bad diet? These questions have a personal connection. I enjoy exercising in all forms, especially through organized sports like swimming but also in casual forms like pick up basketball and bike riding. However, I find it quite difficult to maintain a healthy diet when faced with Ritas and Chick-fil-a at every corner! I know I am not the only one who faces this challenge. I have always wondered if my many hours of swim practice per week could make up for lapses in my diet! And, which is more important, a healthy diet or getting exercise?! To simulate a healthy diet, I will feed the flies extra yeast, which is beneficial to them. For an unhealthy diet, I am giving the flies extra sugar, which is bad for them. You may be asking, how do fruit flies exercise? Good question! Since fruit flies have a natural tendency to crawl against gravity, I can harness that instinct to basically force the flies to exercise. In order to exercise the flies, I have a somewhat complicated contraption set up which I call my “fruit fly gym”. I am using a kitchen stand mixer to continuously hit/spin a bingo ball cage. I attached a fan speed control to lower the speed of the mixer, so it doesn't cause too much jolting to the cage. Inside of the cage, are the vials of fruit flies. When the mixer hits the bingo ball cage, the flies will be rotated/knocked, causing them to fall to the bottom and their instinct to climb kicks in. I plan to do this for 2 hours per day to simulate a work out session… Basically, exercise for the fruit flies.
I am very excited to get started, gather data, and see the results of my project! Hello again! Last time you heard from me I was simply introducing myself where I had already completed my introduction experiment that was originally assigned. The question I was assigned was how the intake of rhodiola in the fly diet and inflammation affect fly alertness through negative geotaxis. I hypothesized that inflammation of the stomach would result in negative effects to their energy, while the usage of rhodiola would increase their energy in general. My reasoning being that rhodiola is often used to help with gastrointestinal inflammation and is used to improve energy, stamina, strength and mental capacity, so distributing this to flies who weren't already affected with stomach inflammation would have an increased energy. My data unfortunately did not represent my hypothesis, instead the data revealed that the flies stayed relatively sluggish regardless of the fact that some of them were exposed to rhodiola. So far in the program, we have chosen what we want to explore for our independent project, and have planned the first week of our independent projects, but have only completed one day of the experiment. The first day only included sorting flies, creating food which was mixed with our drug of choice. My independent project will be testing the effects that Lead and Bisphenol A contaminants in food have on developing flies (pupae). I have chosen to focus on this because of my interest in food contaminants in our food. While we already have a clear idea as a society that Lead contamination negatively affects the health of vulnerable parties such as infants, the studies on the health effects of Bisphenol A are a lot more unexplored which is why I chose to focus on these two contaminates, while Lead will act as a comparison. To test this I will be using a larval locomotion. Thank you for taking the time to read, I will see you in the next blog!
I have been having a great time at TRIP so far! I love all the support from the TRIP staff and students! For my independent project I have recently been setting up a project to analyse how sugar and isolation affects a fruit fly. I will do this by isolating a group of fruit flies as pupae with and without sugar. Of course for my control I will have a group of flies who live together from their pupae stage with and without sugar. To test the change in health I will test the flies anxiety, courtship, and organ health. I made this project because as someone who stayed indoors for most of the day to COVID-19 and eating junk food I wanted to know the effects. Since fruit flies are a model organism to humans, an organism that is closely genetically related to humans, I can test to see how the conditions of COVID-19 can affect you. Since my last blog post, a lot has happened. Fruit flies are the only thing I talk about to all my friends and family members (they might be getting a little annoyed by now) and I’ve started my independent project! My independent project is something that is very important to me, as it stems from personal issues. As I mentioned in my last blog, I’ve had a plethora of medical issues in recent years, but the standout one is my frequent migraines. My migraines are so incredibly painful that I can’t function properly; they bring me to the point of slamming myself in the head with different objects or wishing for death just to relieve the pain. And because all the drugs I have (prescription and over-the-counter) don’t work to relieve the pain, I am often left with immense pain and no solution. This is the problem I wanted to tackle in my independent project. Since I can’t induce a migraine in a fruit fly, I had to expand my topic to pain relief in general (which probably has more applications) instead of specifically pain relief for migraines. I also decided to use two different methods to attempt to relieve my flies’ pain: drugging them with ginger and short-term exposure to a cold environment before running assays (two different methods for pain relief means I have a lot of experimental conditions and a lot of flies to sort). I picked ginger because it is said to have many beneficial medicinal properties, including pain relief and I chose exposure to cold because being in the cold sometimes reduces my pain when I get migraines. After I picked my pain relief methods, it was time to injure my flies. To induce pain in my flies, I turned to my old friend: the head trauma device which I used in my intro experiment. After testing different doses of head trauma, Dr. Leystra and I decided that three-hits at a 30-degree angle provided the best results in terms of how much pain the flies felt. Tomorrow, I’m going to test my flies with the negative geotaxis assay and possibly a pain sensitivity assay to see how the ginger diet and short-term cold affects their pain. I am super excited to see the results of my project and all the conclusions I will be able to draw!
![]() Hi everyone! The first few weeks have been more than exciting as I’ve already gained some experience in working with fruit flies. From the start, we began working on our introductory experiments. Throughout the series of trials, it has been wonderful working with my peers, tackling the challenges of the lab together. Thanks to Dr. Leystra and Dr. Purdy, I’ve gained much more confidence in trying out new equipment and working with fruit flies in the lab. The best part is, it only gets even more exciting from here! As the third week of TRIP is underway, we have officially begun our independent research projects. After multiple days of practice, I’ve decided to study the effect of blue light on anxiety and energy levels. Throughout quarantine, technology has grown in numerous ways and has surrounded every individual, both children and adults. As we’ve all taken classes or meetings from home, the amount of time we spend around technology, whether it's a computer, television, or phone screen, has only increased. As a result, I became interested in what kind of impact all this technology has on our bodies. Research has already shown blue light decreases vision in humans but does it have additional negative effects on us? Since the growth in technology is relatively recent and new, I plan to discover just how dangerous blue light can be on our mental and physical health. ![]() Now that we’re further into our introductory experiments, I can honestly say I’ve learned a lot, not just about my experiment, but also about lab skills. Particularly, the importance of going slowly and remaining focused. For my introductory experiment, I was studying the effects of St. John’s Wort and circadian rhythm on mood. This experiment involves wrapping two vials in aluminum foil to keep the flies in constant darkness. During this process, I made a mistake and accidentally wrapped all my vials in foil, stressing out every fly. The next time, when I came to conduct the Open Field Test Assay in order to measure the stress level of the flies, I was aware of my mistake, and as expected, every fly was stressed and none of the flies remained in the center. Even though I made a mistake, I was able to fix it in time to make sure the embryos and larvae in the vial were not stressed. Since then I’ve paid more attention to what the procedure of the experiment is and what I’m doing. We’ve also just started our independent projects and I’m really excited to see how everyone’s turn out. I’m investigating the impact of gut microbiome diversity on sociability. In a study I read, it was found that people with larger social networks, or those that were considered “more sociable”, had more diverse microbiomes. This led me to two questions, one was “Does social interaction impact microbiome diversity?” and the other was, “Does microbiome diversity impact sociability?” While my first question would have been really fun to study, it would take an incredibly long time to execute, which made the second question more feasible for the time we have in the program. With Dr. Leystra and the other students’ help, we were able to create a plan by adjusting the dosage of a probiotic to impact the amount of diversity in the gut microbiome. I may have released more than a few flies while sorting them into the experimental vials but thankfully it didn’t seem to impact my experiment so far.
Next time I’m going to be running the social space assay in order to analyze the fruit flies’ sociability and also setting up another set of vials. Although I overestimated the amount of time it would take to set all my vials up in my experimental plan, I’m glad I overestimated because that means I’m faster than I think and also I’ll hopefully have enough time to run the whole assay next time without being pressed for time. I’m excited to see how everyone’s projects progress over the next few weeks! Hey everyone!! These past few weeks have been absolutely phenomenal in the TRIP labs. It is truly amazing how inspiring and driven my fellow classmates are. I wholeheartedly enjoyed listening to everyones project proposals and watching classmates collaborate to work out the technicalities of each project. These past few weeks have taught me the importance of having a community that you can trust to provide criticism when it is needed.
Along with learning the importance of criticism, I have also learned how to successfully dissect and photograph larval fruit fly brains! This dissection is crucial to my independent project, so I was insistent on practicing this dissection as quickly as I could. At first, I was rather slow and sloppy with my dissections. However, as time went on and more brains were dissected, I was able to dissect the brains quicker and cleaner than before. In the coming weeks, I am extremely excited to begin the first trials of my independent project. My project will look at the effects of Kratom, a plant that has effects similar to opioids, use on larval brain size. I am currently preparing myself to withstand the hours of larval brain dissections that I will have to perform in the coming weeks. Although this project will be a lot of work in such a short amount of time, I am excited to start collecting data and analyzing results. Welcome back to my blog! We are on the third week of TRIP and I feel like I’ve accomplished so much already! I performed my first experiment looking at how intestinal inflammation and Vitamin E affect adult locomotion, and I did this via the negative geotaxis assay which gives a good indication of a fly’s overall health and activity levels. I’ve prepared fly food and learned how to handle, identify, and sort fruit flies by gender by using CO2 gas to knock them out and paint brushes to separate them (images below). This knowledge was useful when I had to sort out flies for my independent project. The experimental question I chose to investigate is how does genetically modified cornstarch vs. non genetically modified cornstarch affect a fruit fly’s gut & overall health. The reason I am interested in investigating this is because of the mixed opinions and research I‘ve read about GMOs. I wanted to understand this debate more clearly for my own health. I want to explore whether consuming GMOs is truly detrimental to one's health. We all just started our first day of working on our projects this past Tuesday. On that day I was able to sort all my flies into my four vials, weigh out their food, and make the drug stocks in addition to adding them to the fly food. I also collected developmental data on the flies that I had set up from day 1. I have become more comfortable finding my way around the lab and have enjoyed being able to talk through anything I have questions on with the TAs, Dr. Leystra, and my peers. The career panels online have also been helpful to hear what people who have studied science are doing in the professional world. Overall, it’s been a great few weeks and I’m excited to see what comes next!
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