Dosophila Fruit Fly Experiment

Drosophila melanogaster is also known as the fruit fly. It “has played a central role in developmental biology during the twentieth century”. The fruit fly is considered a model organism for many reasons. Drosophila is low maintenance creatures that are easy to care for. Since they are such a small size, scientists are able to control numerous amounts of the Drosophila melanogaster at any given time. Drosophila reproduces many offspring and the offspring are created in a very fast fourteen-day cycle. The mutations are easy to identify because the traits that are affected are noticeable. (1) It contains only a few chromosomes. The only ones that contain a significant amount of genetic information are chromosomes two, three, and X. The female …show more content…
Drosophila melanogaster is a fruit fly so it obviously a fly. This means that the fly can be put asleep before the beginning of the experiment. Drosophila is easily anesthetized and then ready to observe. Once the flies are anesthetized and ready to observe, they were gently tapped out of the specific vial being used and placed onto an index card. The index card was then placed onto the stage of the microscope. After this is done, one fly was observed at a time by moving one of the flies into view by using a brush. By looking at the Drosophila melanogaster the phenotype and sex was observed by looking for particular characteristics. A female fly can be distinguished from a male because she has stripes and males have dark underbellies. The wings were also examined and were determined to be wild type or vestigial mutant. Wild type had wings that were long, circular, and smooth in appearance. The vestigial wings were shorter, crumpled, shriveled, and wrinkled. An important thing to notice was making sure that which flies had already been observed were kept track of. A useful thing to help is after observing the fly is to brush it to the right side of the index card. There was a total of six flies examined with their sex and phenotype recorded. After, there was another six flies observed from another …show more content…
The drosophila’s are low maintenance creatures that are easy to care for. They very small so the use of a dissecting microscope is required. Scientists are able to control numerous amounts of the Drosophila melanogaster at any given time because they are so small. By examining the phenotype of a certain amount of Drosophila offspring with the qualities that portray the sex and whether the fly it mutant or not. The genotypes of parents were figured out. Determining the mode of inheritance can examine the genetic traits that are passed from one generation to the next generation and so forth. Therefore determining the genotype of offspring can then use the mode of inheritance to determine the parental