Week 4 Behavioral Genetics. Rover/Sitter (larvae)

Link to Fly Lab Handout

GENERAL EXPECTATIONS

Students will work in pairs to quantify crawling distance for Drosophila larvae on normal food substrate.

Student pairs will develop their own experiment in order to determine if there is an affect of Rover/Sitter alleles in the novel paradigm. Ideas from last year included: testing larvae in the dark, testing larvae in bright light, testing larvae when caffeine was added to the normal yeast paste.

required reading:
Sokolowski, M.B.(1980) Foragige strategies of Drosophila melanogaster: A chromosomal analysis. Behavior Genetics 10:291-301.
Osborne, K.A., Robichon, A., Burgess, E., Butland, S., Shaw, R.A., Coulthard, A., Pereria, H.S., Greenspan, R.J. and Sokolowski, M.B. (1997) Natural behavior polymophism due to a cGMP-dependent protein kinase of Drosophila. Science 277:834-836.
Fitzpatrick, M.J., Feder, E., Rowe, L. and Sokolowski, M.B.(2007) Maintaining a behavior polymophism by frqeuency-dependent selection on a single gene. Nature 447:210213.

suggested reading:
Pereira, H.S., MacDonal, D.E., Hilliker, A.J. and Sokolowski, M.B.(1995) Chaser (Csr), a new gene affecting larval foraging behavior in Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics 141:263-270.

TO BE EVALUATED

All raw data for the primary experiment MUST be entered to the class spread sheet.

Students will make a brief presentation to the class regarding the independent experiment if there is time.

Every student is expected to keep their own lab notebook and not rely on the notebook of a labmate, however when data is recorded it need not be copied, a clear statement of where the data is recorded is sufficient.
Lab notebooks will be evaluated!