Starting it back up

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

Slowly collecting the mutants

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:

Four minutes not enough

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.

Success: rsh Stock has rsh1 Mutation

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.

Little by little

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:

Creating gRNAs via PCR

It’s a start

The first few rutabaga and radish mutants have been measured and so far it looks good: standard duration yaw torque learning – the situation all three groups should learn.