The Buzz on Fruit Flies by Dylan Goodman

Hello everyone! Some time has passed and we are around half way through the program, which is crazy. These past few weeks I have learned so much from TRIP itself, the instructors, and the others around me. The project I have been working on is the kickoff experiment, where I looked at the effect of soap and Vitamin D3 on adult fly anxiety. I hypothesized the soap, which increases intestinal inflammation, will increase behaviors of anxiety in adult flies. Furthermore, Vitamin D3 will be able to mitigate these effects. To determine the levels of anxiety in the fruit flies, I placed one fly in each of the three agar-petri dishes and observed to see how many times they crossed the center of the dish. For this, I had to take three flies from each vial to gather results. If the flies cross the center of the petri dish more often, it is indicated that they have lower anxiety levels compared to the flies who do not cross the center. Overall, I found that Vitamin D3 did help to decrease the effects of the soap to a certain extent. This gave me a feel of what to expect for my individual experiment.

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I began to ponder on what to explore individually for my project and thought about a disease that runs in my own family, which is diabetes. After researching different supplements, I found that a drug called chromium picolinate helps with high blood pressure. Therefore, I started to come up with an idea having to do with starvation and the chromium picolinate. However, after discussing with the instructors, I understood that this experiment would work best by observing a high-sugar diet along with the supplement so that I am able to study it within a model for diabetes. In order to study this, I will be performing the life span and glucose metabolism assays. I am so excited to see what I find and to observe the effects of the chromium picolinate on a high sugar diet! 
I am beyond thrilled to start my experiment!