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