Kickin' Off Onto Fly Sleep Deprivation! by Daniel Lee

Hey again everyone! It's already Week 6 and I'm back to tell you all about how my kickoff experiment went! Lot's of new knowledge has flooded my brain but I'm lovin’ it! From staring at small, wriggling larvae to creating grape plates, I've learned so much in the short amount of time I've spent at TRIP. Ah right, the kickoff experiment! To recap, I looked into how Valerian and a high sugar diet affect fruit fly anxiety levels. I conducted the Open Field Test, an assay measuring fly distance traveled and amount of time spent near the center of assay, all in order to determine fruit fly anxiety levels. 

From my results, all of the flies seemed to be really anxious. I guess that's what you get when you constantly hover over them and constantly knock them out! That's what practice is for, right? All in all, the kickoff experiment was loads of fun. It was definitely a challenging, and very rewarding, experience. It helped me to get more experience on my lab skills, such as pipetting and my ability to handle the fruit flies (we won't talk about the ones that escaped). ​

Now that we've finished with the kickoff, we're heading onto the independent experiment! For this endeavor, I am looking at the question of "how does sleep deprivation affect fruit fly social avoidance?" I am asking this question since I am very interested in sleep deprivation (totally not because of personal experience) and the relationship between sleep deprivation and stress. Oftentimes, high stress can lead to sleep loss which, in turn, can worsen physiological stress responses. It's similar to a positive feedback loop in which the cycle just keeps on spinning! I also am really interested in the concept of fight or flight and how stressed flies could possibly give different responses when compared to control flies. I plan on trying to test out that concept through my experiment with stress signals, more specifically the dSO hormone, acting as a possible trigger for the ‘flight’ mechanism. Along with ‘flight’ is ‘fight’, which entails rewards aka a mate, a female fly in this case.

I wouldn't say that it's all set in stone yet, but I'll make sure that I fill you all in next time. Hopefully I can gather some delectable data! See you all in a bit!