Tuesday, September 25, 2007

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

4 comments:

about:blank said...

Reminds me of yesterday's conversation...blue light acting as a cocktail of smells..but don't you think that corn medium smell would have become long-term considering the fly literally lives in it?
P.S: Matrix-like pod seems ideal, total-control solution. What would the poor things feed on though? 'Tis practically unattainable as yet.

about:blank said...

What caveats could conditional odor receptor mutants possibly have? Plain undoable is different...one always has to try. Loved the phrase "olfactory virgin"...great articulation :D

about:blank said...

oye virgin hunter! no answer to my questions yet!!! prince of procrastination thou art...i demand ze answer!

Pushkar said...

amazing revealation...extremely similar question is being raised here... :)
Can a fly smell a smell if it has never seen that smell before ?
abt the caveats, i dunno, many may pop up whn u think of actual experimentation details...