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.
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