Finally have about half the number of flies needed. It looked like the flies that used the FoxP virgins didn’t fly as well as the other flies, so we dropped that branch and have stopped using them for the crosses. Pooling the FoxP>aPKC/CRISPR flies no increases the N in this group:

Added more flies to the aPKC knock-out in FoxP neurons. Now the knock-outs are close to zero, but one of the controls, too. Still too early to say much. The figure looks ok now, but the Bayes Factors get chopped off. need to fix this. As I’m, already working on some figures (histograms) in the code, I can fix this as well.

At long last, I got all the flies together that we need for sufficient statistical power. As the preliminary data had indicated, WTB flies don’t learn with the short training, while rut and rsh flies do just fine.

However, this may be due to genetic background effects, so we need to check the CRISPR mutants.

Last week, the torque mete ran for two days and I managed to record a few radish flies:

Finally, thanks to Marcella gluing to fly wheels instead of one, the mutant data are starting to roll in on the shortened self-learning experiment:

Short yaw torque learning, i.e., only one minute per period. Orange: training, yellow: test. WTB: wild type Berlin, rut: rutabaga learning mutants. With this short training of only 4 minutes, wild type flies show no torque preference in the after training, while at least the first few rutabaga flies show such a preference:

So far, I only could get one radish fly to make it through the experiment, so I cannot display it here.

Below you can find the data I collected from the offspring flies:

-> offspring from trained parents

-> offspring from untrained parents

(I left out data from flies that showed negative preference during two training periods in a row)

Eight minutes of yaw torque training work just fine for both wild type and mutant flies:

Reducing the training to four minutes is not enough for wild type flies:

Now it will be exciting to see if the mutants still do what they did many years ago: learn better than wild type.

Since the results I got after training the parental flies looked a bit odd on first sight I decided to take a closer view…

First I excluded some weird animals that either showed a larger preference for one side than avoidance or showed no avoidance two training periods in a row:

Next I compared the behavior of flies that showed avoidance but no learning with the behavior of the remaining flies:

-> Avoidance is almost the same but note the first test period!

Lastly I split the data according to male and female flies. Here is what I got:

-> Looks a bit like there is negative learning in the male flies however I don´t have enough data to be sure…

As an overview here are all the flies (except for the excluded ones) together again: