They say “time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana.” Today, in one session our budding geneticists were able to make observations of different Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) genetic lineages and see how their behaviors compared with one another. They then designed methodology for how to induce seizures in their flies, such that they are able to measure and collect data on what the longest seizure duration is for each genetic type as well as how quickly they are able to recover from stress-induced seizures. Students also learned about parametric statistics which will allow them to be able to do the calculations necessary to measure time as a variable.
Today in the other session, students used tasting papers to determine who could taste PTC and discussed what possible genotypes students would have based on their ability to taste PTC or not. We also started a new experiment – bacterial transformation – whereby normal E. coli cells are given a new gene – the gene for Green Fluorescent Protein (GFG).
