Fruit Fly Lab Report

This summer I had an internship working in Paul Garrity’s behavioral biology lab at Brandeis University and conducted experiments on genetically modified common fruit fly, Drosophilia. There I learned about the important research that is being done on these fruit flies throughout the country and the burgeoning science of genetic modification that has begun dominating laboratories across the country. This research focused in on the sensory receptors that the flies use to detect changes in humidity and temperature. Using genetic modification we could manipulate which genes expressed themselves and through extensive trials could uncover which genes are integral to the sensory systems we were interested in. The work that I actually did in the lab has formed and shaped my bedrock of understanding of behavioral analysis and genetic modification. Each experiment started with defining which genes we would be isolating for that experiment. From the direction of Professor Garrity I would use the particular genotype we were focusing on across the lab and prepare at least 30 of those flies for testing. My assignment to study the effects of the genetically engineering on the flies senses was the first time I had ever …show more content…
But recently the cost, time, and difficulty of gene modification has been cut down to a 1% of what it was with the development of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR and the discovery of the protein CAS9. CAS9 is a protein that acts as a precise DNA surgeon capable of cutting out very specific segments of DNA from an animal’s chromosomes and can also be used to add in new segments of DNA. The groundbreaking discovery was that CAS9 could be programmed for any specific code of