June 19, 2003
Inebriometer
The fact that I am leaving at the end of next week has somewhat limited what I have been able to do in lab. I am still getting all of my stocks of flies grown up, so I don't really have enough of any of them to do any experiments. To avoid being an utter slacker for the past few days, I have been doing lots of research and reading about stress responses in drosophila. I have come across lots of fun studies...
When I get back from the wedding, I will be able to get my flies hopped-up on all kinds of stuff. I can hardly wait.
I just acquired "26 Mixes for Cash" by Aphex Twin. Thank the lord for hotline. Most of the remixes are essentially original Aphex Twin tracks with occasional samples from the original song. There are a couple of genuine 100% Aphex tracks on the album as well which are quite good. I say this album=enjoy.
So what sorts of things are you going to subject the poor flies to?
Wow! I didn't know the hotline community was still active. Now I guess I'll have to begin the task of finding good sites all over again. Are any of the tracker search sites still working?
Posted by: Jacob at June 19, 2003 10:31 PMI think I am going to repeat the caffeine experiments I did first quarter, and then move on to nicotine. Other people in the lab are going to do things like cigarette smoke and car exhaust, and possibly heavy metals like arsenic and lead. When it is all over and lots of flies have been stressed, we will do some hard-core data analysis and try to tease out genes that are regulated similarly in response to all of the stresses in an attempt to find universal stress response mechanisms. If all goes well, we should be ready to publish it at the end of the summer.
I was surprised as well that hotline was still around. HotlineHQ doesn't exist anymore as far as I can tell, but if you click on the "hotline" link in my post, it will take you to a pretty good hotline search engine.
Posted by: Doug at June 20, 2003 09:59 AMCigarette smoke? Car exhaust? How do you control for the various components of these things? Or will the Materials and Methods specify, "Flies were exposed to 60cm^3 of Menthol Marlboros manufactured on September 18, 2002 in Pokeepsie, IL"?
Posted by: Jacob at June 20, 2003 10:49 AMYep, just plain cigarette smoke with all of its wacky additives. Keep in mind that we are also doing very defined stresses such as 5%oxygen for 2 hours, or various concentrations of CO2 for various times. It should be interesting to compare the results of these stresses with those from the exhaust/cigarette smoke experiments.
Posted by: Doug at June 20, 2003 12:17 PM