Follow. The. Directions. by Evan Qiang

​Unless you love cutting heads off of fruit flies, you should probably reread the procedure a million times before you actually start the procedure.

​This week, we conducted our assays that we were assigned to in the beginning of the course. I studied the effect of cinnamon and high sugar on glucose metabolism in fruit flies. Even though the assay was pretty complex, involving multiple machines and different devices, everything went well in the beginning. I was learning a lot, and things became a little bit easier for me.

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​For my assay, I had to cut the heads off of some flies. It was kind of disgusting at first, but I eventually got used to it and began killing the flies like it was a normal thing to do. In the picture, the rightmost side contains the heads and the middle section contains the flies without their heads. I didn’t realize that the heads were so small, and that made it a lot harder to find and cut off.

These were my final results at the end of the assay. As you can see, one vial is clearly different than the others, and that is all my fault. I continued on to one step without realizing that I skipped over another step. Thankfully, only my stressor vial was affected, but if this was my actual independent project, I would have to go through the grueling task of killing the flies and retrieving their glucose all over again.

For my independent project, I’m still exactly sure what I want to do or what I want to focus on. Testing memory sounds interesting to me since that can have many real-life implications. I was also thinking about addressing sleep since I know a lot of my friends are not getting enough sleep. Therefore, my tentative experiment is to see the effects of sleep amounts on memory, but this could definitely change as I look into other ideas.