Week 6 - Oct 8 & 9
Behavioral Genetics. Rover/Sitter (adult)

LINK to FLY LAB HANDOUT (same a last week's)

GENERAL EXPECTATIONS

Students will work with the same partner as las week using PCR in order to determine the genotype for the two fly stocks.

Students pairs will quantify walking distance following feeding for the same individuals from last week which will have now mature to be adults. It has previously been domonstrated at a population level that rover and sitter alleles confer different "post feeding walking phenotype" (Pereira and Sokolowski, 1995). Interestingly not all locomotory behaviors associated with food are similarly affected. Shaver et al., (1998) demonstrated that attraction to food is reduced in rover genotype adults compared to sitter mutants.

This week we are interested in individual variation. It is my hypothesis that larval path length will correlate with adult walking distance for individuals within a sinlge genotype. When researchers work with Drosophila, they rarely pay attention to individual variation and are concerned only with population level analysis, therefore, to the best of my knowledge, this hypothesis has not been tested (except by one independent project last year).

READ:
Pereira, H.S. and Sokolowski, M.B.(1995) Mutations in larval foragine gene affect adult locomotory behavior after feeding in Drosophila melanogaster. PNAS 90:5044-5046.
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.

EXTRA:
Shaver, S.A., Varnam, C.J., Hilliker, A.J. and Sokolowski, M.B. (1998) The foraging gene affects adult but not larval olfactory-related behavior in Drosophila melanogaster. Behav. Brain Res. 95:23-99

TO BE EVALUATED

All raw data for the adult experiment MUST be entered to the class spread sheet. Students will work as pairs to interrogate the data to test the above hypothesis. Each student pair will complete graphical reprentation of the data, a statement as to whether or not the hypothesis was supported, and a brief description of the statistical methods that were used to test the hypothesis. Students may choose to use JMP, or R for the statistical analysis.

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!