Also, the campers continued their explorations of drosophila melanogaster – the common fruit fly (a widely-used model organism in biological studies). Throughout the week, campers have studied normal fruit flies (as well as flies with various genetic mutations) in order to get familiar with handling and observing them. We’ve challenged them to become acclimated to “best practices” with data collection from these tiny, yet useful organisms. Some of our mutant flies are from a lineage of flies that has been used in actual genetics research involving epilepsy. Our campers identified stimuli which elicit seizure-like activity in the mutant flies, to determine the longevity of the seizure and latency time (recovery time, post-seizure). They followed these studies with a fascinating experiment which tested the effect of (actual) anti-epileptic drugs on the seizure-activity of the flies.
