First Look into My TRIP Experience by Carmen Bonner

From calculating dilutions to measuring anxiety in fruit flies, we’re doing everything here at TRIP! In these first few weeks, I’ve completed my kickoff experiment, given my first TRIP presentation, and started planning my independent project. It’s been a whirlwind of challenging, interesting, engaging, and fun.

​In my kickoff experiment, I studied the impact of licorice and intestinal inflammation on anxiety. Ingesting soap can cause intestinal inflammation, while licorice has been known to help combat it. To test these claims, I made four vials of food: one with soap in it, one with licorice, one with both, and one with neither. Making these vials introduced me to preparing solutions and sorting flies. I found sorting to be fun and relatively simple, but I felt bad for the flies, since we had to knock them out by exposing them to high levels of carbon dioxide, thus causing low levels of oxygen. In my hypothesis, I predicted that the flies eating soap would be the most anxious, due to the negative effects on their intestines. I thought the flies in the control group, eating normal food, would be the least anxious, and the flies eating soap and licorice at the same time would have anxiety levels close to the control group, since the effects of the soap and the licorice would cancel each other out. When testing anxiety, we use the Centrophobism Assay, also known as the Open Field Test. During the protocol, I timed the seconds a fly spent in the center of a small Petri dish. Anxious flies spend more time at the edge of the dish than at the center. An anxious animal does not want to spend time in the middle of a space, open and vulnerable; it wants to be at the edges and corners (think about how you’d feel if you walked into an unfamiliar room full of people you didn’t know. Would you move to the very center of the room?). This assay can also test locomotion. Along with seconds spent in the center, I timed seconds that the flies spent moving. I did three tests per vial and calculated the averages. My results were surprising, contradicting my hypothesis. The flies eating licorice and soap alone were less anxious than the control group and the flies eating the soap + licorice combination. However, ingesting licorice and soap alone greatly decreased locomotion compared to the control, but the combination made the flies more mobile than the substances alone. Overall, it was an interesting experiment, but I do not plan to do the Centrophobism Assay in the future. I felt as though there were too many variables, too many steps in the process that could have made the flies anxious, such as transferring and sorting them.

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For my independent project, I will be studying the gut microbiome. This topic has interested me since I had an unfortunate experience with a bacterial infection and my mom suggested taking probiotics while recovering in order to help my gut return to its normal microbial balance. I’ve since wondered about the effect of probiotics and whether or not taking a probiotic supplement would have helped me. I also took a microbiology class at my high school last semester and found the topic extremely fascinating, so I came into TRIP with a desire to study something to do with microbiomes. At first, I wanted to study the impact of probiotics on the gut microbiome after exposure to antibiotics, an experiment that would replicate my experience. But after workshopping with Dr. Purdy, Dr. Austria, Dr. Valdes, and my TRIP classmates, it was determined that such an experiment would not be possible with our time constraints and lab days being only once a week. We figured out a more doable experiment, one that still interests me. I will be looking at how prebiotics compare to probiotics, pertaining to their effects on the gut microbiome and on overall health of the flies. Both are meant to improve the health and diversity of bacteria in our digestive systems, but not much research has been done into their true effect on our health.

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​I greatly value everything I learned from my first experiment here, and I’m so excited to dive into the next one!