Time FLIES When You're Having Fun by Phoebe Ting

Hi everyone! I’m back, and I can’t believe we’re already halfway through the TRIP program. I have learned so much in the past few weeks, from how to transfer and sort flies to different behavioral assays. My favorite part so far has been presenting my kickoff experiment to my peers. For this experiment, I studied the effects of Valerian and disrupted circadian rhythms on the sociability of fruit flies. To determine the sociability levels of the fruit flies, I placed them in chambers and calculated their distance after 15 minutes; the closer the distance between the flies, the more social they were. I found that Valerian increased sociability and constant darkness in flies (a.k.a disrupted circadian rhythms) decreased sociability.

This piqued my interest in sleep deprivation, especially because of its relevance among teenagers. It feels like all high schoolers are constantly lacking sleep and self-medicating with coffee and energy drinks despite the potential negative effects. Naturally, I fell down a rabbit hole of researching energy drinks and their effects. Initially, I planned to study how sleep deprivation and energy drinks affect cognitive function for my independent research project. However, after discussing this idea with the instructors, I decided to tweak my project to focus specifically on energy drinks and their short-term and transgenerational effects on fruit fly motility. To study this, I will be performing the negative geotaxis and larval locomotion assays. I’m excited to see whether there are differences in motility between the short-term and transgenerational flies.

I can’t wait to share my results in the next post!!