Fly Custards and Fly Jelly

Fly Custard
The corn medium has smell. I wonder how much influence that smell is having on the larval olfactory circuit which I intend to put to "adaptation/recovery" tests. The smell is a cocktail. And my worms have ploughed through it endlessly before they were abducted for a larval plate test.

Can the smell be fixed? So lets think of something else. Wish there was a Matrix like "pod" for the larva. A larva living its life oblivious to "reality". Life would be so easy for the fly worker. el yo el

Excuse me on my lack of information as basic as this. I guess the fly cannot be grown on just glucose. The vitamins et al things must be imported into the worm body as it develops and the yolk resources get exhausted. But m gonna test this one.

Fly Jelly
Lets get a fly couple to mate on an agarose gel block soaked in glucose solution. A sort of fly date on the beach el yo el. Then see if the eggs hatch and observe how far a larva goes through its development. This way there would be little smell that the larva would have seen in its "past life" and would be an olfactory virgin when I show it the aromatics during my plate tests.

P.S.: A genetic way of doing it (one of the ways (at least in principle) ) would be making a line which is conditional mutant for olfactory receptor expression and induce the receptor expression just before your plate test. But I suppose it could also have its caveats and may be plain un-doable.

P.P.S.: The P.S. was put there to save face just in case the glucose-gel-beach way was found to be just too ultra low tech by some. :D

On Evolution

A gene may get duplicated. This may be followed by mutation in one of the copies. Functionally if this "mutated" version is very different from its counterpart then one will call it a new gene rather than simply an allele of the "original" gene. Thus a species gets a new gene. But it may also simply acquire a gene "horizontally". The rates of both these phenomenon taking place would be expected to be determined by the species under consideration. Still one may ask, generally how do they compare in their contribution to creation of new genes?
Furthermore, once a gene has been acquired by a species its maintenance would be contingent upon its contribution to the species fitness. It would be conserved if it is useful else lost if redundant (or found to be deleterious). What are the rates of this "gene dumping" phenomenon? Wondering if these "rates" could be quantitated. Then it would be interesting to compare the rate of acquiring a gene and the rate of losing a gene. Dont remember why I thought of these questions but still it would be fun to know their answers if possible.

Wiring - An Interlude : The 2nd Rotation

The promised wiring blog posts are still to arrive. Maybe I am still ruminating the ideas expressed in the last two neuro lectures (its been 2 weeks already). One was on olfactory and the other on optical path-finding. Who knows, these posts may not even happen.

Newayz.

The olfaction lecture + couple of posters on olfaction + AWS + fly seems like such a cool system + other things = too difficult to resist rotating in the olfaction lab.

So here I am. Begins officially this Monday. Already been assigned to a "project" and given a dozen papers to read. The latter in preparation of a sort of a mega-journal club this Tuesday.

If you smell what the rock... :D

P.S.: Picture - C155-Chops larval pre-exposure to excitatory light just before the the "Larval Plate Test".

Wiring : An Interlude - DBS TIFR AWS On Adult Neurogenesis

Epigenetic mechanisms speculated in neurological stress response in maternal separation paradigm of mice neurobiology model.

This one hit me like a bullet. Shaken.