Elizabeth’s BioBlog

     This past month has been full of setbacks. When we started moving to the new lab I thought it would be a two week project and everything would settle down. I was wrong…

    It’s been more than a month and still some things are still not set up. Moving a lab is a lot harder than I thought, especially when so many new things and adjustments have to be made. It’s been a month of cleaning, arranging, drilling, cleaning, rearranging, and drilling again, and so on. One of our freezers rebelled against us and stopped working (It has been brought back to obedience though) and at some point flies were escaping inside one of the incubators. Then, our Drosophila culture became infested with mites, so we had to quarantine more than 50 tubes of flies. But, I’m glad to say, everything is under control now.

It has been a fun and interesting process, but now I’m ready to fully start on my project, which I’m sure will be very soon. So, I have done a lot this past month, but have reached less than 10% of my objectives. I’ll be catching up soon enough!

    The Drosophila embryo is an oval structure of about 500 μM in length and has a diameter of about 180 μM. Think of it this way, a grain of rice is about 5000 μM long, which means you can roughly fit 10 embryos on top of it. The first image shows a fruit fly laying an egg. It gives you an idea how big the egg is compared to the fly. Now that you get the picture, imagine trying to dissect it. Sounds hard, right? It is.

I spent a big part of last semester trying to learn the technique of dissecting the embryos and I haven’t fully achieved it yet. But I’m getting there! How exactly is this done? The dissection tools, or “Embryo Torture Devices” as we call them in the lab, are basically two heat pulled capillary tubes that make for very fine tipped “scalpels”. The embryos are placed on a microscope slide in a little “pool” made with tape, slightly covered with water, and placed under the dissection microscope. With the pulled needles, one has to try to hold the embryo still with one of them, and use the other to make a vertical cut with just the right pressure. An excess of pressure will cause the embryo to burst. Then (and this is the part I’m still working on), with the pulled needle, one has to take the “flaps” on either side of the vertical cut and pull them open to expose the interior of the embryo. Again, I remind you that this is under the microscope with a 500 μM long object.

    The purpose of this technique is to be able to do an in vivo analysis of the processes going on at the time of neuromuscular synaptogenesis. I will be using this technique further down the road for certain parts of my project, so I better practice.