Head Trauma and Heavy Metals by Izzy Catalano

Hello! It’s been a speedy five weeks, but a lot has happened since my last blog. My first few weeks in this program have been phenomenal. So far, I've made a lot of new friends and morgued a lot of flies, which leaves me with some conflicting emotions. I am so grateful for all of the people I have met, especially because of how new so many things have been to me these past couple of weeks. With some hard work and the help of my peers, I've finished my kickoff experiment and begun my independent project. 

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Firstly, I have finished and presented my kickoff experiment. My question was about analyzing the effects of Ginkgo Biloba and head trauma on the sociability of fruit flies. In this experiment, I learned how to go about experimenting with and analyzing model organisms. This will help me in my independent project. I also presented my findings to my peers and instructors. This gave me some great constructive feedback and will help me prepare to present at the end of TRIP. Overall, I am very happy with all that I have learned in the first couple TRIP sessions.

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Now, I've begun to work on my independent project. The topic I have settled on is the effects of manganese poisoning and milk thistle on offspring. I will be looking into generational effects to analyze if this form of heavy metal poisoning affects the overall health of offspring. This means that I will have a lot of flies, but I am very excited. I chose this because for lithium batteries, people need to mine manganese. The production of lithium batteries has only begun to such a high degree in recent years, so it is unknown the generational effects of poisoning from this metal. I am interested in if there will be generational effects, what that could look like, and if it can be mitigated with milk thistle. In conclusion, this will be a fun approaching couple of weeks. 

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