Independent Project by Lataviya Brady

Hello, my name is Lataviya Brady and I will be talking about my independent project. I will be experimenting the effects of coffee on fruit flies. I want to see if there are any effects on activity and female fertility when fruit flies are exposed to different amounts of liquid black coffee. Personally I thought about this idea mainly because I happen to drink coffee not often but sometimes before school starts because I am always sleepy and end up falling asleep in the middle of class. I try to cut the coffee down by drinking it only 2-3 times a week just to be safe. But what I’m trying to figure out is how do different amounts of coffee affect the fertility and activity of a living organism.

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In my experiment I will be dealing with assays like female fertility and negative geotaxis. Negative Geotaxis refers to a freely moving organism in response to gravity. So for example, say if I expose the drug coffee to the fruit fly and I want to test how the flies react to gravity. Will they go up to the top of the vial in less than 3 seconds or more than 3 seconds? I’m testing activity with the Negative Geotaxis assay. In the female fertility assay all I’m doing is counting how many embryos each vial lays in the matter of 2 hours on a grape plate with some yeast paste so the flies lay their embryos in a warm comfy place. My control (untreated vial, only food and water) is the average amount of embryos laid from female fruit flies, so if there is more or less embryos in each treated vial then that would mean my drug (coffee) affects female fertility. If it is around the same rate of embryos laid than the average then coffee probably doesn’t affect fertility. Hopefully coffee does not affect fertility in a bad way.

The past few weeks in TRIP have been wonderful, kinda tricky, but overall wonderful. In the first few weeks of TRIP I have been working on my fly project with a drug close to my interest. My first experiment with fruit flies was fun but overwhelming since I’ve messed up a very important part of my project I couldn’t receive accurate data. Even though I messed up, Dr. Gardiner told me that it wasn’t the end of the world and that everyone messes up, so I moved on and hoped that I can do better next time and learn from my mistakes. I presented my project towards the class and have gotten some feedback about it, basically it was about my overall performance and what I need to work on whilst presenting. The presentation  was like a practice presentation before my Independent Project presentation. Overall it’s like a practice before the independent project of the course.​