Time is Flying By! by Amritha Sakamuri

Hi everyone! It’s been a while! I can’t believe we are already halfway through our journey at TRIP! These past few weeks have been an incredible experience. I have learned and grown so much in the lab. I am able to measure liquids with a micropipette, make grape plates, analyze data, and my personal favorite, work with fruit flies!

Currently I am finishing up my kick-off experiment; I tested how female fertility is affected by Red Clover (a perennial herb native to southeastern Europe) and a high sugar diet over a short period of time. To test this, I conducted the female fertility assay. This assay tells you how many unhatched embryos per female fly there are. After analyzing my data, I came to the conclusion that both Red Clover and a high sugar diet individually increased the number of embryos and female fertility, but the usage of both decreased the number of embryos per female in comparison to my control vial. 

As we finish up my kick-off experiment, now I am brainstorming ideas for my independent project. Due to my own experience with insomnia, I would like to test how sleep deprivation and the consumption of melatonin affect anxiety and female fertility. I am planning to expose some of my flies to constant light to deprive them from sleep, this would be the stressor of my experiment. As for the drug, some of melatonin’s known side effects are to induce anxiety and to reduce the effectiveness of contraceptives. I am very excited to see how this turns out because it directly impacts anyone who utilizes melatonin or experiences sleep deprivation. To test how these factors affect anxiety and female fertility, I would use the open field test to determine whether the flies are anxious, and the female fertility assay to find the number of embryos.  The open field test is when you place a fruit fly in the middle of an agar plate, and depending on where or if the fly moves, you can determine whether it is anxious or not. For the female fertility assay, you essentially make an incubator with a grape plate and a conical tube. After a 2 hour incubation period, you count the number of embryos. 

I am very excited to see how this goes! I’ll make sure to update you guys soon!