Fruit Fly Lab Report

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Drosophila melanogaster
(commonly known as “Fruit Fly”)

Christopher Moody
Lab TA: Xeniya Rudolf

General Genetics Lab BIOL 2321L- Spring 2017
Section 03

Introduction: Drosophila melanogaster are great model organisms for the study of genetics. This is because there are approximately 16,000 genes observed in fruit flies and we observe much homology in the genomes of fruit flies and humans. For example, “75% of know human disease genes have a recognizable match in the genome of fruit flies” (Xeniya Rudolf, Lecture 8, slide 3). In Drosophila melanogaster, there are two phenotypes for eye color: red and white. A fruit fly exhibiting a red phenotype for eye color possess the normal, wild-type allele for eye color. A fruit fly that exhibits …show more content…

For Cross A, we crossed 5 red-eyed females (w+w+) with 5 white-eyed males (w). For Cross B, we crossed 5 white-eyed females (ww) with 4 red-eyed males (w+; only four males because one of our red-eyed males died). We began this experiment by obtaining four separate vials that contained the four fly genotypes that I mentioned above. We then took the vials of the respective crosses, gently tapped them on the desk to knock the flies to the bottom of the vials, took the stoppers out of the vials and put the open ends together. We had to tap the vials on the desk again to get all of the flies into one vial. We had to perform these procedures for both Cross A and B. After combining the flies into the proper vials, we labeled and turned in to our TA and allowed them to mate for a week.
Week 2: During week two, we had to remove our parental generation from our vials so as to prevent parents and offspring mating. Mating between the parental generation and offspring would result in gene mixing and skew the results of our crosses. To discard of the parental generation, we had to tap the vials on the desk, remove the cotton stopper, then empty the parental generation into a container of alcohol, otherwise known as the “fly

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