Blog Post #2

Epilepsy is a disorder of abnormal electrical activity in the brain that causes seizures. It affects millions of people worldwide, but treatment is virtually inaccessible in low-income countries. While there are FDA approved Anti-Epileptic Drugs (AEDs) to treat epilepsy in humans, these drugs are expensive and usually can only be accessed in a hospital. People in low-income countries with epilepsy are generally unable to access the drugs, leaving them untreated and more likely to die early. Thus, scientists are exploring more affordable and accessible alternatives to approved treatments.

My research will test the effect of licorice root, a common alternative to AEDs, on seizure recovery time in Julius seizure Drosophila melanogaster, a mutant bang-sensitive (bs) strain. I hypothesize that licorice root will shorten seizure recovery times in the aforementioned Drosophila as compared to the negative control; but be as effective as avobenzone, the positive control. Drosophila will be separated into vials containing these sample groups for 24 hours before inducing seizures and timing the recovery. This will be repeated for 3 trials to accumulate 30 data points for each group. The data will be collected by recording the seizures and watching the videos to time each individual fly seizure from the time that the seizure is induced till the fly is standing on its feet again. 

I am currently in my experimental trials. I have completed one trial for the negative control and I am starting to start the trials for the rest of my treatment groups. I will have to conduct more than one trial at once in order to ensure that I finish my research at time. After I finish data collection, I will analyze the data by rewatching all of the videos and timing each individual seizure. Then I will perform two two-tailed t-tests to test for statistical significance. 

At the beginning of this process, I had trouble culturing flies. The first shipment of flies arrived dead and therefore, I was forced to reorder the flies. The flies were delivered before winter break, however due to the weather conditions they had trouble culturing. I was setback for two weeks because I did not have enough of a fly culture to start my pretrials. To accommodate for this I decided to conduct more than one trial at once in order to speed up the data collection process.