Time Flies! by Anjali Kejariwal

6/23/2020

So far, this experience has been exciting, interesting, and overall a great time. I have met so many new high-schoolers with similar interests as mine, and can’t wait to continue to bond with them over fruit flies. ~ Anjali Kejariwal

Hi again! It’s already been four weeks into the program, and I can’t believe how many new things I’ve learned! I never would have imagined studying the life cycle of a fruit fly, learning how to differentiate between male and female flies, or even learning how to make fly food before this program, but I am so glad that I learned.

Over the past weeks I have been conducting a short, preliminary research project (I like to call it the fake research project) in order to become familiar with the different assays and the general research process. For this project, I was studying the effect that darkness, my stressor, and Rhodiola, my drug, had on mood. After finding out that Rhodiola was used to excite and energize humans, or, in this case flies, I hypothesized that flies put in dark environments and given Rhodiola won’t have a change in mood.

Presenting her screen project!

After creating the drug vials, sorting the flies, and checking the developmental data weekly, I completed the social space assay to determine how social the flies were. This assay compared the distances between flies of each condition to determine their sociability. The shorter distances meant that the flies were more active/social, while larger distances meant they were less active/social. So far, this experience has been exciting, interesting, and overall a great time. I have met so many new high-schoolers with similar interests as mine, and can’t wait to continue to bond with them over fruit flies.

As for my individual research project that I will be conducting over the next weeks, I wanted to choose a topic involving sleep deprivation and memory. Even before being accepted into TRIP, I knew my focus would be about the effects of sleep deprivation because as a high schooler with after-school activities, rigorous coursework, and jobs, I tend to not get the recommended amount of sleep, sometimes not getting sleep at all. I wanted to see whether these sleep patterns affected performance in school with tests and quizzes or just focus in class. With these thoughts and the help of peers and mentors, I finally decided to study how memory is affected by lack of sleep. However, to further challenge myself, and still continue with the high school theme, I also decided to study how caffeine impacts memory. In summary, my research question is how does caffeine and melatonin (a sleep inducing drug) affect cognitive function, specifically memory?