Mid-Break Update

After a very merry Christmas, I spent yesterday afternoon enjoying some fly husbandry in the lab:

The crosses that were set up several weeks ago are coming along nicely. Jane really helped me out by setting up the F2 parents in new bottles last week; yesterday, I cleared the adults out of these bottles and am looking forward to the F3 progeny emerging in about 2 weeks.

In other new, the June and Feb stocks are expanded and ready to go for testing once the quarter start. I also went through and keyed out the 11/23/11 collections with the following results:

@ Full Belly Farm, Guinda, CA (elevation 500'), from 103 isofemale lines: 74% D. sim, 11% D. mel, 15% virgin females -> 20 lines D. sim and 10 lines D. mel were added to the CA Collections lab inventory

@ Miller Mandarines, Newcastle, CA (elevation 920'), from 100 isofemale lines: 93% D. sim, 0% D. mel, 7% virgin females -> 20 lines D. sim were added to the CA Collections lab inventory

F1s all grown up... Cross: Phase 2

F1 parents were dosed into bottles to begin phase two of the cross. And it went off with few difficulties (thanks Alan!).

A total for 4 bottles:

mel: 1. F1s from high strains x low strains (June)

2. F1s from high strains x low strains (Feb)

sim: 1. F1s from high strains x low strains (June)

2. F1s from high strains x low strains (Feb)

On Friday we'll pass the flies into new bottles.

The quarter coming to a close

12.05.11

The crosses are looking good. After collecting virgins, things are in position for setting up cages with F1 parents on Wednesday. In two cases, both copies of a mating failed (1x sim, 1x mel), but we plan to compromise by adding additional individuals of the reciprocal mating (which should closely aligned everywhere except on the sex chromosomes).

More to come on Wednesday!

12.02.11

Met with Dmitri and Alan this afternoon. Alan and I walked through the basics of the cross for the benefit of bringing Dmitri up to date with the work. The aim of the cross is to create an outbreed swarm that we can then phenotype and genotype with the end goal of isolating causative climate adaptive alleles.

We also discussed the need to build a first pass at a fractionator. This draft tower should be completed to be analyzed before the end of the quarter. An issue I foresee is getting the baffles to lie flush with the sides of the tower. A possible solution to this problem is to make the baffles out of a thin material, since the baffles won't have to deal with too much force on them (just the weight of a few comatose flies).

Looking forward, we want to figure out the methodology to assess more phenotypes. This work could have multiple benefits: we may find an easier or more informative phenotype to characterize than heat shock, and we'll also be characterizing phenotypes from recently wild flies whose populations haven't (as far as I know) been analyzed in these ways.

Official Beginnings!

Coming out to society at 1:30pm meeting.