Genetics Lab

Tweet

The third week of the second-semester class started on Monday. I am taking a genetics class this semester and so far I am enjoying it. It is a lot more in depth then the description of the class gives it so I was a little under-prepared for the class. We have already had two quizzes so far. We have also started our semester-long fruit fly lab. This is where my lab partner and I knock out several types of fruit flies, breed them to get virgin fruit flies, and then cross breed them. We have wild, white, vestigial, sepia, and apterous type flies. We are currently still in our pupae state after all of our parental generation mated. We got larva after the first week of breeding them and put them in their vials. We have to constantly check on them for the next few days for when they turn into baby flies. After they have moved onto becoming baby flies we only have 8 short hours to knock out them out and mate them. After those 8 hours, they have already mated with their siblings and are no longer usable because they only mate once and then lay a ton of eggs. We are going to have used some of the white flies from our professors stock of flies though because none of ours seem to want to lay enough eggs for us to use. We were also informed by several other professors that this experiment never turns out the way it is supposed to and they don't understand why they keep spending the money on it to do it.