Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Programs

Week 1: My Lab

Posted by Nicholas Schwartz on 2009-06-12

Hey,

My name is Nick Schwartz. I am from Ann Arbor, Michigan, where it is not 90 and muggy every day in the summer. Actually, I haven't really had any problems with the weather here so far. Maybe that is because I have been in the lab during the hottest part of the day though. But I have found it quite nice at Duke, so long as I properly hydrate.

So, on to the meat of the post: my lab. I am working in the lab of Dr. Dan Tracey. The Tracey lab studies drosophila melanogaster, more commonly known as fruit flies. Drosophila is a useful organism because many mutations have caused there to be different genotypes that are easily distinguishable and it has a relatively short life cycle, making it useful for genetic research. Since other organisms, such as humans, possess many of the same genes as drosophila melanogaster, understanding the genetics of fruit fly can go along way to understanding other biological life. For reasons such as this, its entire genome has been sequenced.

Dr. Tracey’s lab focuses on pain signaling and nociception in drosophila, but I am doing my project on something slightly different. I hope to study the decision making of drosophila feeding on different sugars. It has been found that the sugar sucrose can actually inhibit drosophila from laying egg. At first glance, this does not seem to make a whole lot of sense because drosophila are attracted to high sugar substances to feed and lay eggs. What we hope to do is perform a lot of tests with a variety of sugars to find any basic preferences. Then, we are planning on trying to mimic the concentrations of sugars in grapes, and see what sense we can make of drosophila’s apparent inhibitory response to sucrose. There are also some other variables we can manipulate depending on our findings. Hopefully, this will allow us to understand the decision-making mechanisms of drosophila better. As the summer progresses, I’ll post more on how my research project is coming.

One of the first things that comes to mind, well, for me at least, when someone mentions research, is people manipulating complicated machinery and obtaining results that only a specialist would be able to understand. However, this is not the basis of research. To quote Polonius completely out of context, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.” One thing that has stayed fairly constant in Western Science over the past couple hundred years is a reliance on the Scientific Method, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. It turns out collegiate laboratories are no different from seventh grade science projects in this regard. Dr. Tracey places a lot of emphasis on creating a hypothesis before you do start experimenting around with the flies. This makes a lot of sense. As tempting as it is to start running a bunch of trials, the results are going to be meaningless if you do not know what to expect. Additionally, research can be very expensive, so to get a grant a researcher will often need a clear, detailed, and interesting proposal. Fortunately, most of the materials I am probably going to be working with are relatively cheap, so it will not be the end of the world if I mess up. Still, I needed to do a lot of background research in order to create a proposal for my summer project.

I greatly improved my abilities on handling the drosophila from the first to second day. However, this was probably because I was moving faster and was a little overly aggressive. I accidently decapitated two of them; one incident was very rapid, while the other one progressed more slowly; without getting too graphic, it kind of got stuck fairly deep in the brush tool that we use to slide then and pick them up, and there getting its body out with its head intact was a pretty hopeless cause. Under the microscope, a beheaded drosophila can be a little intimidating. However, whenever I need any reassurance, I can always move back from the microscope and remind myself who’s boss.

I also learned another important lesson in the lab: always pay attention to what you are doing. Once I got distracted while preparing a sucrose agarose solution in the microwave, and heard a pop, which corresponded to the cap I loosely put on flying off, and solution spilling on the microwave (perhaps this might explain the sign on the microwave reminding no-one to try to warm up lunch there). Fortunately, my solution was mostly just sugar water. The important lesson I drew from this experience, though, is that *crap* happens, even in the lab. However, you can still try to learn from it. I should have heated the solution in a different flask than the bottle I used, but even more importantly, I should have been paying closer attention to my solution while it was heating. Diligent and careful work cannot prevent every mishap, but it can go a long way to preventing these kind of blunders.

Anyway, I hope you have found my post interesting. The couple weeks of the lab are quite a learning expereince, so it is nice to be able to reflect upon everything. Anyway, hopefully by the next time I post, the Detroit Red Wings will be celebrating their second straight Stanley Cup!

I'll conclude with some pictures:

Summer reading doesn't end at high school.