Blog 2 by Rohan Ramprasad

Hey everyone, it’s Rohan here, and it's great to see you all again! We have just finished week 5 and are moving onto week 6! The time is really “flying” by! Over the past couple of weeks we have been working through our kickoff experiment projects, and my research question was How do Rhodiola and Head Trauma affect Anxiety in Fruit Flies? Weeks prior I had sorted 30 male and 30 female flies, using CO2 gas to knock them out, each into 4 different vials, and the vials were a control, stressor only, drug only, and stressor and drug vial. After these flies lived in their respective vials for a week, I needed to test the anxiety of my flies, which I did using an “Open Field Test”. The open field test puts 3 files into dishes and watches their movement. The closer they are to the side of the dish, the more anxious they are, and the closer to the middle they are, the less anxious they are. After taking pictures, collecting my data, and analyzing it I put together a presentation for my peers to learn about my kickoff experiment. My results were inconclusive, yet despite this, I learned so much! I learned how to properly run an experiment using an assay and how to collect and analyze various kinds of data. 

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Can Bilberry Extract ameliorate the negative effects of induced heat shock on Drosophila melanogaster health, as measured by negative geotaxis?

We are currently transitioning to our independent project and after a long day of planning it out, I have decided to investigate the question, Can Bilberry Extract ameliorate the negative effects of induced heat shock on Drosophila melanogaster health, as measured by negative geotaxis? Bilberry Extract contains a chemical compound called Anthocyanins. Through my work in critical care medicine on Ambulances, I have discovered that heat shock/stroke can be extremely detrimental to humans and there are virtually no fast acting medications that work against the adverse effects of heat stroke/shock. One part of Anthocyanins is that they can act as an anti-inflammatory supplement. This part of Anthocyanins could mitigate the effects of heat shock on human bodies as they tend to cramp up and cannot move after heat shock. By giving them high doses of Anthocyanins, they could then be relieved, internally, of all the inflammation caused by the heat shock and thus improve their mobility. To measure their mobility, I am using an assay called Negative Geotaxis which essentially measures the movement of flies in a short time frame. 

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Over the next couple of weeks I will be running this experiment and I am very excited to see the results. Who knows, maybe one day the research I do here could save lives in the community! See you all next week!