So I got new flies to test. After one day of testing, I had only one control fly going through the test, all the 5 other were dead. That one did not learn.

I thus confirm that there is a problem with these flies. This means that I have no phenotype with one RNAi, and one phenotype with the other non-triggered RNAi which is probably not self-learning specific. This also means that the RNAi induction may not be sufficient and that I have no positive control for that.

The RNAi data are therefore not conclusive at all (neither positive nor negative results can be linked to any gene).

PS: I have checked the flies and overexpression of GFP did occur after 2 days Heatshock.

I will check the mutant again next week and I will be over with learning experiments. Still need some anatomy but then, I can finish the paper.

While Bjoern is in Hawaii, I used the flight simulator.

I got sufficient good flies to do 4 experiments. That’s really encouraging that the majority of the flies survived, kept their hook and flew for more than the 20 minutes required!

The other side of the coin is that I did not had any learning effect, and fly do not even avoid the punished side during the training phases: it seems something’s wrong with the laser. I bet that there is a very important trick I don’t know about the laser alignment…

but Everything will work!