Extension experiments
1. Are all females able to reproduce and lay eggs? Try putting single virgin females in a vial, add one or two males and see if offspring are produced. Make multiple replicates of this, at least 25 to 50 for significant results.
2. How does the life cycle change with a change in photoperiod? Using an artificial light source set up an experiment with changing photoperiods and note if there is a difference in the life cycle.
3. How does temperature effect the life cycle? Same as with the photoperiod.
4. Inducing pesticide resistance. Buy a common insecticide and apply at increasing doses to obtain resistant flies.
5. Using X rays to form mutations. This is from: http://www.biochem.northwestern.edu/carthew/manual/Xray.html,
part of the Carthew lab manual
X RAY MUTAGENESIS
Collect 0 to 2 day old adult males and let them age a further 2 days at 25 C.
Aliquot the flies into groups of 50 each. Place each group of 50 into a gelatin
capsule (Lilly, No.000) which has been perforated with a 23 gauge needle. Put
the capsules in a petri dish on ice. Make sure the flies get cool. Take care
that the flies and capsule do not get wet. Place the dish in the X ray machine
and give the flies a 4000 rad dose (115 kV; 5 mA). Alternatively, place males
in empty vials and lay vials on their sides in x-ray machine before giving them
a 4000 rad dose. Immediately transfer the flies to a vial with plenty of yeast
and allow them to recover for a few hours. Let the males mate with an equal
number of 3 day old virgin females. I like to put 30 of each sex in a bottle.
Knock the flies into fresh bottles on successive days and on the fourth day
discard the flies. Starting with 400 males, one can easily get ten to twenty
thousand F1 flies to screen. original text by Richard Carthew. UV light may
also produce noticeable mutations.
7. Since they are fruit flies and it is believed that they are attracted to fermenting fruit, what is the best "natural food" to raise flies on.
8. Select 3 or 4 mutation strains, add 5 fertilized females from each into the same vial. Note the phenotypes and sex of the next 4 or 5 generations. Is there a shift to one phenotype? Use Hardy-Weinberg to calculate allele frequencies.
9. An excellent web page with a protocol for showing inheritance of X-linked traits AND chromosome mapping. http://www.houmboldt.edu/~msw13/440_html/fly.html