Week Six

Happy Spring Break everybody! The University of Arizona is on spring break this week, which means the three  undergraduates who with me make up the drug screen team in the lab are currently out of town, leaving me to continue to run the experiments, collect data, and hopefully not mess anything up.

In addition to more larval turning (because you can never turn too many larvae, right? No, actually, I'm still collecting a full data set for the larvae eating both the high protein and high sugar food. A full data set is thirty larvae per condition (specific genotype and concentration)) I have also taken over setting up the survival data for the week. My team is collecting data on how long adult flies that have 'recovered' from ALS (do not have crumpled wings, but instead have straight normal wings) can live. We then compare this data to how long the flies would normally live on their normal food, and see if there is any improvement and increase in their lifespan. So I have been collecting males flies with straight wings every day from the crosses we set up on high sugar and high protein food. Every three days I then check to see how many flies are still alive, and record the number.

The experiments with high sugar and high protein are about half way done at this point, at least with the larval turning. From the data I have collected so far, it seems like the high sugar diet may have some positive outcome on the motor functions of larvae, which shows that it is countering the debilitation that the disease causes. However, there is not noticeable change with the high protein diet. Of course, nothing can be said for sure until all the data is collected. And then if something looks particularly promising, we will probably have to collect a second set of data, to verify the first set.

Week Four

Week four was, as always, very busy in the lab. I virgined, larval turned, and set up crosses of fruit flies. Wednesday was lab meeting, and this week a graduate student, Alyssa, was presenting about a paper she was hoping to publish that had recently been sent to reviews and returned with corrections that should be made before being sent to a scientific journal or magazine. The paper discussed how futsch, a microtubule-associated protein expressed in both  central and peripheral nervous system neurons, is a translational target and is neuroprotective. The entire lab contributed on ways to make the paper publishing ready, by explaining and defending the thesis and data presented in the paper. Alyssa discussed what the reviews found flawed in her paper, and what they determined to be not clear enough. The lab also discussed what scientific journal would be best to send this paper. For me, this was a really interesting look into the publishing process of a scientific research paper.

I also began to input my larval turning data that I have been collecting for the last two weeks into excel. I re-learned how to work excel, as it seems I have to every time I use it, and I looked for statistical significance in the data I collected. I don't have a full set of data quite yet, but as soon as I do I will be able to look to see if the diet of high sugar is improving the motor function of the diseased larvae enough to be statistically significant.