Wonderful Few Weeks! by Egor Sakhabutdinov

It’s been a few weeks into TRIP, and it has been nothing short of amazing. I got to do things that I’ve never done before, like icing and sorting flies and using micropipettes. The kickoff experiment was an incredible view into experimenting with flies. My project was about seeing the effects of intestinal inflammation and fly motility. I’ve induced intestinal inflammation by adding soap into the fly food and used licorice as a drug to help alleviate the inflammation and improve motility. A week later, I tested the flies’ motility by using Negative Geotaxis Assay, where I recorded the height to which flies climbed in three seconds and determined if they had normal or low motility. Although the results were not something I expected, almost all of the flies sat at the bottom of the vial and therefore were recorded as having low motility. The process of sharing my findings to my peers and instructors through a presentation taught me a lot about how to convey ideas in science and biology. 

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Now that we are finished with the kickoff experiment, I can’t wait to embark on my own project where I will be examining the effects of titanium dioxide and fly fertility. I’ve always been fascinated with public health, and I wanted my project to reflect that passion of mine. The reason I chose this topic was because of this: the substance is banned in many countries for being potentially carcinogenic and having negative effects on reproductive health, but it is still used in many US products like food, cosmetics, and other everyday supplies. Since the research into titanium dioxide is not conclusive, I want to widen that gap and enrich the scientific community.

​The process of sharing my findings to my peers and instructors through a presentation taught me a lot about how to convey ideas in science and biology.