Elizabeth’s BioBlog

Reaching the finish line

After another month hard at work with every aspect of a drosophila laboratory we’ve progressed (on a scale from 1-5) a 3. We have put on hold the needle pulling and continued with embryo immunohistochemistry with different CAMs and myosin. I have acquired some images that show the presence of fas II (intracellular domain) in embryos at stages 13-15. In these images we can see that fas II is present at the central nervous systema and in all nerves throughout the body. The images acquired are shown below

Working at a laboratory with animal models has its complications and setbacks. Weekly, we confront many problems with the Drosophila population that need to be resolved immediately (or else we risk losing the stocks). We constantly have problems with factors like fungi in the bottles, mites in the stocks, food thats too hard or dry, flies dying for mysterious reasons, and to top that, problems with the fluorescence in specific lines of flies. Attending these issues takes time and effort that keeps me away from experiments. We have made new food, cleaned the bottles and tubes to get rid of the fungi and the mites, and isolated fluorescent larvae and embryos to make stocks that are expressing the GFP correctly. We hope that our continuos efforts in keeping our population have a positive outcome.