A couple of weeks ago I did a workshop as part of the BLAST project at Bournemouth University organised by Vicky Isley and Paul Smith of Boredom Research – http://www.boredomresearch.net/
The workshop took the form of a selection experiment using some of my Drosophila titanus flies and some new cultures of the same phenotype as a control. As my flies have been living under orange light for a few months now I wanted to see if their natural phototaxis towards blue and UV light had been altered. As well as testing against accepted and proven light responses I wanted to test against the evidence and assumptions that we generate ourselves.
To carry out the experiment it was necessary to make a simple Y-trap apparatus with a blue or UV LED in one end and an orange LED in the other. Its important to add resistors to ensure that the intensity of the light from each is equal and will offer no selection incentive. The device, once made, is held on a laboratory clamp, and the whole experiment is placed inside a large box to isolate it from ambient light. Using a ‘pooter’ we can acquire a number of flies from the culture vial and place them directly into the trap. The flies are then left to their own devices for about 3 minutes and the number of flies in each tube are counted, before being placed in a new appropriately marked vial.
The results on this occasion were fairly unsurprising. The natural instinct to move towards the blue/UV light sources is still very strong in my flies. More conditioning is necessary to prepare them for an orangey life on Titan…
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