I got mutant from Amita and will test them when out of quarantine. Then, we will have a clear answer about the compensatory mechanisms (the former mutant I tested was probably not null). There is also 2 other RNAi lines for PKC53e from the TriP project.

I am waiting for chrisi to be back and we will see what flies we need to order to bloomington in addition to these two. (There is also another RNAi against FoxP…)
The outcross of the RNAi is also running (3d cross, now).
We will then have 3 RNAi and one mutant, if the results are consistent, this would be enough to convince people that PKC53e is the PKC involved.

[pdf lab.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/tG80_PKCi_c380G_subset.pdf 500 600]

tG80_PKCi_c380G_subset

n=6 but high self learning score for UAS-GFP; chaGal4,chaGal80 x tubGal80ts; UASPKCi  (that I wanted to use as a positive control).

next step is to test a real positive control again (d42Gal4 or elavGal4 if I do not have any d42Gal4  males tomorrow), along with the d42Gal4,chaGal80.

A lot of things I learned at the neurofly. First my old friend Benjamin is doing a great postdoc in Bruno van Swinderen lab. It was great to see his data on isoflurane effects and the correlation between sleep disorder and sensitivity to anesthesia.

More related to our interests, I learned that Paul Tchénio has now a prototype to visualize neuronal activity in about half of the fly brain at a decent frequency. It may be interesting to get in touch with him again.

Andre Fiala is doing/has already done the TDC-Flp construct and is using his own UAS-stop-TRPA1 line to get a subset of octopaminergic neurons. Christine will contact him soon to have more information and maybe start a collaboration with him. The student was not at his/her poster when we went there, and we could not talk directly to him/her.

I nice talk by F. Mohammad (Singapore) showed that centrophobism can be associated with anxiety: the majority of treatments used with mices (for instance immobilisation in a pipet tip) also induce more (or less for some treatments) centrophobisms in flies. I told him about the CeTrAn, he said he will look at it. (his flies were in a squared box, with their wings untouched).

Jhl21 (receptor for JH) change of larval behavior at the  wandering stage (go slower and turn more): it acts at the NMJ to change the clustering of glutamate receptors. Similar thing may happen during the first hour of life of the fly, when they become phototactic ?

A nice poster from the Heisenberg’s lab show that flies do have a preferred 0 torque. Even when giving some closed loop drift, the histogram of torque suggest that the preference for the 0 torque is still there (non-uniform distribution around the +1 torque which stabilize the drift. It seems the distribution around the 0 torque is seen only if you have long enough data, I told them I would ask Satish to look at his distributions. This emphasizes why we need to be very careful in preparing the fly for our experiments…

I may have to look at the OK6 Gal4 line for motorneurons, and new RNAi lines seem to be available for PKC53e and FoxP…

I also talked to Flybase people, David was there. It seems the Buridan results should lead to 2 different entries: one linking each genotype to a dichotomic description of the phenotype (“mutant1” – “has larger”- “median_speed”) and one to the raw data and analysis. This will not be easy to automatize, but looks interesting.

I am probably forgetting a couple of things in addition to my discussion with Anette Schenk and her student Anna about FoxP..