Fall 2021 Group 2B

Introduction

How does manipulating the expression of ALS genes in the glia cells of fruit flies affect the climbing ability of the flies? 

This is the question we aimed to answer this semester. And we did this by setting up crosses to manipulate gene expression in flies and using locomotor/climbing assays to evaluate motor function. We also did some computational analysis to get a list of gene candidates that we want to test in the upcoming semester.

Conclusion

Overall, this semester our team worked together to further our understanding of fly genetics and crosses, coding to merge lists, and fruit fly lab techniques. A majority of our time was focused on setting up crosses to get specific flies that we could test using the locomotor/climbing assays. However, we found that there were zero of the flies that we wanted to collect (repoGAL4 / UAS-GR80). This led to a discussion on why the flies are dying and we came up with some possible reasons. One point that we are moving forward with is to test when the flies are dying. We are going to test this by crossing UAS-GR80 with ScO / CyO-GFP to get UAS-GR80 / CyO-GFP which will enable us to use GFP to evaluate the phenotypes in each life stage. Also, next semester we plan to set up crosses using specific genes of interest that we found to test the effects those genes have on motor function. So the goal is to end up with flies of the genotype: UAS-GR80 / CyO-GFP ; UAS-RNAi / TM6b,TbSb that we can test with the locomotor assays. 

Team Notebook