My Independent Project by Julia Morris

For my setup, I first made 4 vials. One was my control group, so there was no coffee in their food. Then I had 3 other vials with caffeine in the food at an increasing amount. I then sorted and placed 60 flies in each vial: 30 females and 30 males. They were next  placed into the incubator, where I will continue with them on Tuesday. ​

Hi TRIP community!!!
This past week I started my independent project, where I am trying to answer the question: How does the withdrawal of coffee affect the mood and activity of flies and their offspring? I derived inspiration for this question from my school peers, as many drink so much coffee. Most consider stopping but they don’t know how it will affect them… so, I was curious about this and decided to use it as my experiment. For my experiment, I will be placing coffee into the food of my flies, then after some time, I will place the flies in different vials with no caffeine so as to simulate withdrawal. 

During the first few weeks of this program, I learned so much about being in a lab and how to manage fruit flies.
Did you know that you could use CO2 to anesthetize flies and sort them?
You can also use ice to knock them out for assays.

It’s also pretty easy to distinguish the males from the females, as males have a prominent black rear and females don’t. I was able to figure out how much caffeine I would need to put in each vial after performing some drug calculations. I had to create two stock solutions because the weight of the coffee that I calculated was too small to weigh. So, I dissolved the coffee into 10 ml of water and 50 ml of water. I used a micro-pipette (pictured right) to dissolve the coffee. 

I’ve learned so much in the past few weeks and I can’t wait to continue my experiment and collect some data!