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Introduction
Group 2A focused on testing the effect of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease, on the locomotion of flies. Specifically, we aimed to answer the question, "How do the genes we will manipulate affect the locomotion of flies?"
We hypothesized the following:
Hypothesis: the genes that we will manipulate will decrease locomotion more than the control flies
Null hypothesis: The genes we will manipulate will not decrease/have any effect on the locomotion of flies
This information is essential because it is important to discover and share the effects of how neurological diseases, such as ALS, can affect the health of individuals. Furthermore, by knowing the effects, symptoms, and more of ALS, treatments, and prevention can be generated to reduce the detrimental effects of ALS within affected individuals.
Crosses from this semester that we tested:
Control: UAS-GR^control (males) x vglutGal4 (female virgins)
Test: UAS-GR^80/Cy0 (males) x vglutGal4 (female virgins)
Next crosses:
Results:
What were you expecting to see?
We expected to see the UAS-GR80 when expressed in neurons would decrease their overall locomotion compared to the control flies. Unfortunately, we didn't get to test the experimental group due to them always getting trapped in the food and dying before we were able to test them. We did technically have one trial, but there were only 4 flies that survived and were able to be tested, so we threw out that data since it wasn't going to be accurate.
What did you actually see?
For our control flies expressing UAS-GR^(control), we found that the white eyed flies weren't nearly as active as the red-eyed controls
Conclusions:
Can you conclude anything?
There's not much to conclude, based on the issue that our experimental crosses never yielded enough viable flies to test. We did however conclude that we should use red-eyed flies in our testing for the control group.
What would you do differently if you did this again?
The flies in our ALS neuron group were dying before we could actually test them, so we need to either find a way to change the level of expression or by some other way ensure that the flies don't die before testing them. The flies were either getting stuck and dying there as a result of the crack in the fly food, or it was a combination of the flies being sick and getting stuck. We could be more careful to switch out vials when the food starts to crack, or control the humidity to decrease cracking overall, or change the expression.
For the Future:
In the future, our group needs to be able to test the ALS neuron expression from our previous cross setup before they're able to die. We need to figure our a way to either change the expression, perhaps lower the temperature, and/or ensure that we are extra careful with cracking food vials because the flies were either getting stuck and dying there as a result of the crack in the fly food, or it was a combination of the flies being sick and getting stuck that was killing them.
We also want to test our list of genes that we came up with (see Code and Data Sets) by using them in the following cross:
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