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Wow! I gotta say, the past few weeks have gone by so incredibly quick. During Week 1, I already knew a decent amount about fruit flies and their development from other programs, but I can honestly say I now know so much more. It’s really cool how such a small creature can be so incredibly complex in so many ways. I will never be able to thank this program enough for teaching me so much, as well as continuing to fuel my love for research.  A few weeks ago, I shared that I would be completing a Proboscis Extension Response (PER) Assay in order to test the memory of fruit flies drugged with Prozac after being stressed with isolation. Sadly, this project did not work the way I wanted it to. A former TRIP student named Matt came in to help me better understand this assay which I am so incredibly grateful for. He helped explain everything step by step which was an amazing help, however, this assay wasn’t meant to be. Due to the time constrictions of TRIP, I would not have had enough time in order to perfect my technique, as well as be able to run actual trials to get data. After putting in a lot of effort, I ultimately determined, with the help of Dr. Leystra and Ms. P, that this assay was not worth all of the stress I was putting myself under. This particular assay is extremely tedious, time consuming, and was ultimately not for me. The worst part was that I accidentally ate 4 flies (EWWWW!!!).  PER didn’t work the way I wanted it to, so I pivoted. My interest in Prozac, isolation, and memory never changed, so I continued to go with that part of the plan. One of my fellow TRIPmates, named Anjali Verma, developed her own assay. As of right now, it does not have a name, however, I always joke around about calling the Minion Assay. This assay involves heat shocking flies, which causes them pain while they are in a vial with the scent of banana. The flies are then put into a vial with no banana and put into room temp water. After this is repeated, they are put into a T-Maze with banana scent on one side and no scent on the other. If they are properly trained, they will go away from the banana scent, wanting to not be in pain, even though flies without this training would typically go towards the banana. For my experiment specifically, I am using control flies, flies treated with Prozac, flies that have been in isolation since their pupal stage, and flies that were both treated with Prozac and isolated since their pupal stage. As of right now, I am currently analyzing data and am unsure if this experiment will work or not. I do have high hopes, but anything can happen in research. Data is data I guess we’ll have to wait and find out.
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I’m sad to say that my time at TRIP has finally come to an end. I won’t lie; on the first day of the program, I wasn’t sure whether I would enjoy my Tuesday and Thursday mornings at Temple University. I was bombarded with new information and felt challenged while learning about drug stock dilutions. However, as the program shifted focus towards our independent projects and I started to make friends with my amazing TRIP-mates, I began to have so much fun. 
With some extra time in the lab, I also sought to compare the anxiety level of L-Citrulline supplemented flies with caffeine supplemented flies since I often find myself feeling anxious after consuming caffeinated drinks. After 3 repetitions, I found that L-Citrulline may cause non-sleep deprived fruit flies to be less anxious than their caffeine-consuming counterparts. I was very happy with my results and now look for pre-workout products with higher L-Citrulline content.  I am so glad that I decided to apply to TRIP because it was so much more than just a lab. I will say that anyone looking to apply to TRIP in the future should expect a grind: completing homework packets, staying late to sort flies, repeating an experiment because you missed an important step, etc. But in the end, I left with invaluable hands-on experience, confidence to pursue a STEM-related career in the future, and countless memories (most notably getting food from the food trucks at Temple every day with one of my friends I made at TRIP). I even sharpened skills such as communication, creativity, and problem-solving that will undoubtedly translate to areas other than STEM. Overall, I feel super rewarded with my experience and could not think of a better way to spend my summer. Thank you to Dr. Leystra, Ms. P, Diya, my TRIP-mates, and everyone else who made TRIP such a great experience for me.  Wow. It’s hard to believe how fast this TRIP has gone by! Coming into the lab twice a week for 5 weeks seemed like a lot when we first started, but now the program has come to a close and the final presentation is less than a week away. It feels like just yesterday I was walking into the lab for the first time, eager and ready to do real scientific research. I never would have imagined that in just 5 weeks I would be able to sort flies according to their gender, make grape plates, perform assays, and take microscopic fly pictures! Thank you to Dr. Leystra, Ms. Pellegrin, and Diya as they helped me perform my assays efficiently.  Now let's catch up on everything I’ve been doing for the past 5 Tuesdays and Thursdays in the lab. I have finally started conducting my research for my independent project. Over the past few weeks, I have been exploring the effects of Lipitor (cholesterol medication) on fruit fly energy and overall health. Lipitor became an interest of mine because of how many people have high cholesterol and take Lipitor to lower it. Around 38% of the population has high cholesterol and 11% take Lipitor! But what happens when someone continues to take Lipitor after regulating their cholesterol to a normal level? This is precisely what I wanted to test on my fruit flies. Since fruit flies already have normal levels of cholesterol, introducing Lipitor into their diet would essentially be the same as a person taking Lipitor when their cholesterol is in a normal range.  Now let's catch up on everything I’ve been doing for the past 5 Tuesdays and Thursdays in the lab. I have finally started conducting my research for my independent project. Over the past few weeks, I have been exploring the effects of Lipitor (cholesterol medication) on fruit fly energy and overall health. Lipitor became an interest of mine because of how many people have high cholesterol and take Lipitor to lower it. Around 38% of the population has high cholesterol and 11% take Lipitor! But what happens when someone continues to take Lipitor after regulating their cholesterol to a normal level? This is precisely what I wanted to test on my fruit flies. Since fruit flies already have normal levels of cholesterol, introducing Lipitor into their diet would essentially be the same as a person taking Lipitor when their cholesterol is in a normal range.
These past 5 weeks taught me to have a greater appreciation for the scientific research involved in testing the side effects of widely used drugs. I am extremely grateful for the opportunity to conduct my research from start to finish and work alongside some of the best people I’ve met: My TRIP Family! I am looking forward to applying the skills I learned in my future endeavors. This may be the end of an amazing TRIP, but it’s certainly not the end of mine!
Hi again! I can’t believe that TRIP has ended. It has been a great experience learning from Dr. Leystra and Ms. Pellegrin, and learning about my classmates and their projects. I never thought that in such a short period of time I would have completed such a project. 
 After replicating my experiment four times, I found that caffeine had the greatest effect on the energy levels of the flies. This was expected, as we know that caffeine gives humans an energy boost. What I found especially interesting was that the flies that were fed caffeine in their food and deprived of sleep had higher energy levels than those that were well rested and had caffeine.
 My time at TRIP has almost come to an end now. However, the lessons learned during this program will stay with me forever. Reflecting on the five weeks I spent at TRIP, I want to call out two learnings that have given me an entirely new perspective and a deeper appreciation of what research really is.
Second, what comes with iteration is the agility to go after a new direction that may suggest a bigger potential for success. For my project, I wanted to look into sleep deprivation and its impact on metabolism (leading to metabolic diseases such as obesity). What I learned quickly was that measuring metabolism in the flies required specific equipment and reagents that were in shortage at that moment. After some good brainstorms with my advisor, we were able to shift the research question to the impact of mental state by sleep deprivation, which I was able to explore with experiments. In my case, agility to change worked for my project but it may very well be a challenge in actual research, for example, if the researcher has invested so much thinking, time or other resources into the research concept. My learning is that one has to be quick to change the approach in research regardless of what was invested before (for example, I really liked my original idea and wanted to hang on to it). TRIP was an amazing experience. Going to the lectures and running my experiments at the lab was something I really looked forward to every Tuesday and Thursday. I live in the suburbs and I took the train to Temple which worked perfectly for me. I am very grateful to many - I wanted to thank Dr. Leystra and Ms. Pellegrine for helping guide me throughout my project and coaching me for my poster and final presentation. I also wanted to give a shout-out to my TRIP peers for making this one of the best experiences for me!  It is hard to believe that my TRIP is almost over. The last couple weeks have been packed with repetitions of my assay, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. We are finally reaching the final countdown for the final symposium, and I couldn’t be more ecstatic to share my findings with the TRIP community. For my independent project, I decided to compare the effects of nicotine to the effects of vape juice on sociability. My experimental groups consisted of vape with nicotine, vape without nicotine, nicotine sulfate, and most importantly, the control. I was interested in this topic because I constantly catch peers vaping in and out of school and I wanted to know how it was affecting them. So little is known about vape juice itself and side effects are commonly overlooked. Why sociability though? Well, a known side effect of nicotine is that it temporarily boosts your mood, but when going through withdrawal, the opposite occurs. This led me to wonder if vape juice and/or vape juice combined with nicotine would have those same effects.  Using the Social Space assay to gather my data, I collected results that matched my initial hypothesis! The vape with nicotine had the most social flies, while the control group had the least social. The vape without nicotine and nicotine sulfate had about equal sociability. While I had predicted this finding, I was still shocked to see it was accurate. It is crazy a drug like nicotine sulfate and vape juice can have similar side effects, but yet there are so many users that don’t know this! I hope I can spread word about my findings and help make others aware of the scary, yet true realities of vape juice! While I am sad my TRIP journey is coming to an end, I am so happy to have had such an experience. The people I have met on this journey are unforgettable and I am very fortunate to have worked and collaborated with them. I learned how to persevere through failures and how to be optimistic when results aren’t as I expected. If I could relive this experience, I would do it in a heartbeat. Thank you, TRIP!
Last time, I presented you all with my independent research question: Do Metformin, Maca, and Vitex impact female fertility? Due to the high prevalence of fertility complications in the United States that are present due to a broad range of factors, including age, diabetes, and other health conditions, and problems with ovulation, and the variety of drugs that are available to combat this struggle, my research has high applicability. While there is substantial evidence showing the positive impact of Metformin on female fertility, especially among women with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), Maca and Vitex, both herbal, over-the-counter supplements, have inconclusive impacts on fertility.
This program has been one of the most remarkable experiences of my high school career. While, yes, I worked on essential skills that can help me in the lab and academically, such as drug calculations, pipetting, and conducting assays, that was not it. I have grown as a public-speaker that can communicate her experiment and procedure clearly to the audience. I have become better at time management through defining how my limited time each day would be spent each minute prior to even entering the laboratory. Most importantly, I have improved my ability to adapt and quickly change course when something did not go as planned. I could not have reached this destination without the TRIP of the last 12 weeks with my peers, TAs, and Dr. Purdy and Dr. Leystra.   Well, when I said time was flying by, I definitely was not kidding. I remember vividly how slow the four hours went by on my first session in the lab. Now, four hours itself is going by so fast that I am losing track of time. I can’t believe TRIP is coming to an end! It felt like just yesterday when we were all coming to the lab and learning so many new techniques. It’s been quite a while since you last heard from me, so let me catch you up. These past few weeks, I began my independent research project! I was debating on what I wanted to study for quite some time, but I finally decided to test the effects that different doses of iron have on memory and cognitive functionality! Unlike humans who have red blood cells, fruit flies have hemolymph. Iron is known to increase blood flow in humans which is supposed to increase cognitive development and attention. But, since fruit flies do not have blood, I was interested in investigating the direct effects that iron has on the brains of fruit flies, particularly larvae, through testing memory. For my project, I gave fruit flies three different doses of iron (1, 2, and 10 pills) to test how the different doses affect the memory of the larvae (early wormlike stage of fruit flies). I was interested in investigating the direct effects that iron has on the brains of fruit flies, particularly larvae, through testing memory. After weeks of research and analyzing data, I got results! And… the results that I got correlated with my hypothesis! Although my data showed that there was not much difference between the different doses of iron, as I increased the iron dosage up to 2 pills, memory did increase, and when I raised the dosage to 10 pills, memory began to decrease. Even though my results correlated with my hypothesis, the percentage of flies that had intact memory for all three experimental conditions was quite similar. Thus, it’ll take more testing with greater doses to find out if iron actually does affect memory and cognitive functionality.
I’m grateful for hearing about TRIP because it has opened my eyes to a world beyond just experiments in a high school lab I’m grateful for hearing about TRIP because it has opened my eyes to a world beyond just experiments in a high school lab. From stepping into the lab on the first day, I embarked on an amazing journey now leading me up to preparing for my Final Symposium presentation. I look forward to sharing the research I have conducted these past few weeks to a network of TRIP students, teachers, and alumni. Apart from science, through TRIP, I was able to network with many new people, create some great friendships, and work with phenomenal mentors who I hope to keep in touch with. I am thankful to be a part of the TRIP program and community, and hope to continue doing research in the future.
I cannot believe that my time at TRIP is almost over. Over the course of my time here, I learned a new skill or developed one every week, and I am thankful to have gotten this research and lab experience. To be completely honest, TRIP has been some of the “hardest fun” I have ever had. It requires a lot of focus, time, and energy inside and outside the lab, but this turns out to be a positive, given how interesting working with flies is in the experiment I was able to design. Even the early stages of TRIP, when I still had to find my way around, were fun because it was the first time I got to use another animal in an experiment to model a human’s biological processes. There will be times when using flies can get frustrating, like when sorting or transferring them, but it is surprising how much better all of us got with just a few hours of practice.   As I mentioned in my last blog, my independent project studied the effects of nicotine and ginseng on fly sociability. Vaping with nicotine is a rising issue with teenagers, especially in my high school. Twenty percent of teenagers use e-cigarettes in America, and ninety-nine percent of e-cigarette use contains nicotine! With that in mind, I dove into the social effects of nicotine, questioning the unproven idea that nicotine’s use in sociable settings is warranted and helpful. I also wanted to see if nicotine had any negative effects on fly pupal development, as this is when flies transition to adults, corresponding to teenage development within humans. I tested ginseng as well because it is a herb that is commonly used in my Indian culture. It is known to have positive effects on brain function and mood, while nicotine yields opposite effects. I hypothesized that ginseng would increase fly sociability and pupal development because of these benefits, and nicotine would do the opposite. Together, I believed that ginseng would completely counteract the effects of nicotine, causing no noticeable changes within the flies.  I created four new vials every week. The four vials contained nicotine only, ginseng only, both nicotine and ginseng, and neither nicotine nor ginseng to serve as a control. I collected developmental data each week for three weeks after I made my vials by counting the number of eclosed pupae divided by the number of total pupae. The higher this proportion, the better the pupal development. After observing sets of flies, I discovered that all three vials with treatments lowered the development by virtually the same amount when compared to the control. To quantify sociability, I first had to place the flies on ice, sort them, and transfer five males into tiny chambers. I then took pictures of them every five minutes for fifteen minutes. Using Fiji, I measured the average distance between all pairs of flies. I did this for two generations every week: the parent generation, which received their treatments as adults, and the generation of progeny, which received their treatments from birth. Surprisingly, nicotine and ginseng both increased fly sociability in the parent generation, refuting my hypothesis entirely! Interestingly, nicotine and ginseng decreased fly sociability in the generation of progeny. This is likely due to these substances having a negative effect during the critical periods of a fly’s life cycle. The skills I built here will help me for the rest of my life no matter what I pursue. Although working with flies and running our personal experiments was one of the highlights of TRIP, it was so much more. I also learned how to make sense of the data I collected and share that effectively in presentations to a variety of audiences. I got to familiarize myself with a whole new array of scientific tools, run a bunch of assays, and a lot more. Dr. Leystra and Dr. Purdy helped me so much on my TRIP and my peers provided amazing feedback along the way. The skills I built here will help me for the rest of my life no matter what I pursue.
 Wow. I can’t believe how fast this TRIP has gone. It feels like just yesterday I was walking into the lab for the first time, all excited and ready to be a real scientific researcher, but it has really been over three months of rigorous, challenging, and completely rewarding work. I never dreamed that in just 10 weeks, I could learn how to micropipette, sort flies, make bubbling solutions, and even collect and analyze bacteria! With the help of the instructors and TAs, however, as I have learned, anything is possible.
Now, you would think that because nitrate is a toxin and it is found in contaminated water, it would be bad for your health. Surprisingly, it’s not that simple. Nitrate is found in your gut microbiome, which is a place full of bacteria in your digestive tract that maintains your health. So, if nitrate is simultaneously found in your body but also is a contaminant, how exactly does it impact your health? That’s what I set out to find. Since more bacteria in your gut means more diversity, which in turn leads to better health, I measured how much and what type of bacterial colonies were formed from the fruit flies’s gut to quantify my findings.
What we can take away from this is that nitrate’s functions are complicated, and that maybe nitrate isn’t the leading reason for the adverse health effects of contaminated water. Still, it’ll take a lot more research and testing (something that I’ve learned is very common in science) to make more conclusive results, which I’m ready to do, even if my time at TRIP is over. If there’s anything my time at TRIP has taught me, it is that it’s ok to make mistakes. If there’s anything my time at TRIP has taught me, it is that it’s ok to make mistakes. No one expects you to be amazing at something the first time you do it, as I learned when I tried to streak my own bacterial plates (diluting bacteria is not as easy as it looks). With the help of everyone in the program, however, I’ve managed to gain some key skills that will definitely benefit my future plans. And thanks to TRIP, I now know that those places will involve a lab in some way.
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