Fruit Fly Genome Mapping - Day 2 & 6

Published: Thu, 17 Nov 2016

~2 min read

Day 2

I (Sim Ho) came to school as early as possible to check on the problems we had on the first day. As I’ve said before, many who we thought died of overdose of anesthetic woke up, except a Wild type, and two female YellowBody type. I had no fruit available at home to provide the clean tubes food, which was going to be a problem. Fortunately, one of the tubes I named ’???’ is empty of fruit flies, just left of food. I named it ’???’ because I had no idea what combination of fruit flies were in there. It took me a while to realize there are none. I scraped a good portion out of the tube and shared it among the tubes with no food, where fruit flies immediately stuck their mouths to.

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There was not much to do compared to yesterday, thankfully. All I did for today was replacing the dead ones with the living ones, and I was done. What worry I have for now is whether or not we have distinguished male and female fruit flies properly. But now I have a tiny question about them; do fruit flies care about the mutations reproduction-wise? Would they prefer the same mutation type, a different type, or not care at all? I’d imagine they wouldn’t care at all.

Day 6

We are skipping to Day 6 because nothing was done for the other days. I spent the rest of Day 3 organizing our data and experiment process. Day 4 and 5 were weekends. So alright, Day 6, 8 AM, and I find a YellowBody male dead. That’s okay; it happened before, and it’s easy to deal with. What I was frustrated with was the resulting number of maggots.
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As you can see, there is a clear difference between the number of fruit flies on each tubes. I hoped it wasn’t going to be a problem, but the fact that leaving a portion of the food, instead of replacing with fruits, was a problem was unavoidable. If you remember what I wrote on Day 1, I had some tubes partially left of food, because I was sure that they were clean of maggots and other fruit flies. However, that was a terrible conclusion to make since nobody can be sure by just looking at it. It is too likely for there to be eggs that is impossible to see with our bare eyes, and for the maggots to be swimming beneath the food. Well, I knew that, but I chose to ignore it because I didn’t have any food ready, leaving me no choice but to do things as how I did.

Today, however, I brought food. Rotting peach, to be exact.
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camera filter made the fruit look fresh, but they are actually quite brown.

Due to personal tasks to complete, all I did for today was giving the clean tubes fruits. By clean tubes, I mean the ones that I shared ’???’ tube’s food in to. I anesthetized the fruit flies, cleaned their tube empty, and placed a small slice of fruit in them. I’ll have to deal with cleaning all the tubes clean and placing fruits on Day 7.