Line verification SS56699

on Tuesday, August 29th, 2023 7:50 | by

After dissecting brains from the GAL4 driver line SS56699 with GFP staining and finding no fluorescence, I dissected them again and the immunohistochemical staining showed fluorescence. To check that the correct neurons were stained, I compared the images with the image in the paper by Hulse et al (2021; https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66039) . The three PPL1 dopaminergic dorsal fan-shaped body tangential neurons per hemisphere are stained, but there are some additional unidentified neurons (presumably PPM1 neruons) visible.

Hulse, B. K., Haberkern, H., Franconville, R., Turner-Evans, D., Takemura, S.-y., Wolff, T., Noorman, M., Dreher, M., Dan, C., Parekh, R., Hermundstad, A. M., Rubin, G. M., & Jayaraman, V. (2021). A connectome of the Drosophila central complex reveals network motifs suitable for flexible navigation and context-dependent action selection. eLife, 10, e66039. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.66039

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Bachelor Blog / #4 is there something?

on Monday, August 7th, 2023 2:13 | by

The offspring of my first experimental fly cohort finally hatched! Below you find a few first pre-tests I ran last week :)

First, here are the results of a quick test to see if the offspring shows a preference for the parentally trained side after the first training period:

After that I played around with the laser a little bit to find the learning threshhold. I set the laser on 2,6V but the results I got look a bit weird:

-> untrained wtb flies

-> offspring of trained wtb flies

I´m optimistic however there is still a lot of work to do…

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Preferences with higher salt concentration

on Monday, August 7th, 2023 12:46 | by

The following plots show the results after I increased the salt concentration from 1,5M to 2,5M. It shows that the difference between the control groups and experimental group are not significant anymore.

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Success: rsh Stock has rsh1 Mutation

on Monday, August 7th, 2023 11:11 | by

Via gDNA analysis and PCR was the specific area of the rsh gene extracted and amplified where the nucleotide substitution: C to T (Folkers et al., 2006) should be for the rsh1 mutation. The amplicon was Sanger sequenced which proved the nucleotide substitution.

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Bachelor Blog / #3 finally, data!

on Monday, July 24th, 2023 2:22 | by

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Little by little

on Monday, July 24th, 2023 1:59 | by

Despite very warm weather, some flies did fly, even though the learning performance of the control flies was really poor. At least for now, it looks like all stocks are learning and that rut and rsh flies learn at least equally well as the Berlin flies. I’ve also managed to fix the positive preference problem:

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Pure vs Sugar Preference results

on Monday, July 24th, 2023 9:24 | by

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Creating gRNAs via PCR

on Friday, July 7th, 2023 6:38 | by

1% Agarose gel with 100bp marker and PCR1 rsh, PCR2 rsh and PCR3 rsh or PCR1 rut, PCR2 rut and PCR3 rut, respectively.
The template pCFD6 was used with a concentration of 640 pg/µl.
1% Agarose gel with 100bp marker and PCR1 rsh, PCR2 rsh and PCR3 rsh or PCR1 rut, PCR2 rut and PCR3 rut, respectively.
The template pCFD6 was used with a concentration of 64 pg/µl (1:10 dilution).
1% Agarose gel with 100bp marker and PCR1 rsh, PCR2 rsh and PCR3 rsh or PCR1 rut, PCR2 rut and PCR3 rut, respectively.
The template pCFD6 was used with a concentration of 64 pg/µl (1:10 dilution).
50µl of 5xQ5 High GC Enhancer was added to the PCR mix.
1% Agarose gel with 100bp marker and PCR1 rsh, PCR1 rut.
The template pCFD6 was used with a concentration of 128 pg/µl (1:5 dilution).
50µl of 5xQ5 High GC Enhancer was added to the PCR mix.
1% Agarose gel with 100bp marker and PCR1 rsh, PCR2 rsh and PCR3 rsh or PCR1 rut, PCR2 rut and PCR3 rut, respectively.
The template pCFD6 was used with a concentration of 640 pg/µl.
The Phusion DNA Polymerase was used instead of the Q5 High-Fidelity DNA Polymerase.
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Pure vs salt preference results

on Friday, July 7th, 2023 12:57 | by

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Kicked out Canton S

on Thursday, June 29th, 2023 5:25 | by

Since the Canton S strain I used wasn’t a perfect genetic background strain anyway and didn’t fly properly, I kicked it out and replaced it with the wild type Berlin data I had collected just prior to the rut and rsh mutants. Now I can collect data for two projects in one go: I check the rut/rsh learning mutants if they still behave the way they should and with the wtb control strain and continue collecting data to evaluate their optomotor responses after training. So now the learning scores for the three strains look like this:

It still doesn’t look like rut is better than wtb, so I’m still skeptical that the strain is really what it should be. The rsh data also don’t look very promising, but I still need to get more flies with a negative preference before the training.

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