The experimental group was kept in single vials on a ATR+Sucrose mixture for 48h.

stressor: social isolation

Pos_CTRL: control group

Gr28bd+TrpA1(Iso): experimental group

On Wednesday I tested the “heatshock” group, using light (with the same intensity as the aversive stimulus in the joystick experiment: ~800lux) for 5 minutes before testing, to stress the flies.

Stressor: heat (5min; 7.4V; ~800lux)

Gr28bd+TrpA1(Co): control group

Gr28bd+TrpA1: experimental group

 
On Friday I tested flies who were maintained in a cold environment (18°C) during the ATR treatment (2 days).

Stressor: cold (18°C; 48h)

Gr28bd+TrpA1(Co): Control group

Gr28bd+TrpA1: Experimental group

Flies 48 hours on RU486 wetted tissue

Flies 48 hours on RU486 wetted instant_food

Mean OMRs at start

Last week I started to test CsChrimson (NorpA, 20xUAS-Chrimson) flies with the joystick set up, to reproduce Daniels’ data on the positive control and to get used to the experimental set up.

There is a noticeable improvement (from my end) from the first two days of testing to the last two days.

These are the results of the first four days of testing. All in all, the positive control shows good avoidance. Althoug, there is a remarkable change in the error bars starting with the fifth period. Maybe due to exhaustion or any other effect that I don’t know of yet.

I replicated the analysis of the single-cell RNA-sequencing data of the ventral nerve cord from Allen et al., (2020)

tSNE cluster map

rut, rad, VGlut, FoxP expression in clusters:

Aaron M Allen Megan C Neville Sebastian Birtles Vincent Croset Christoph Daniel Treiber Scott Waddell Stephen F Goodwin 
(2020) A single-cell transcriptomic atlas of the adult Drosophila ventral nerve cord
eLife 9:e54074.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.54074

16 flies went through the test out of 48 flies

I retook the images of last week’s brains for MBON02-transtango (trans-tango mkII) imaging. Green channel shows MBON02, red channel shows post-synaptic cells of MBON02: