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.
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