Fruit flies and learning

This week I met with Jon Hayashi, a temp faculty member in the Biosciences Department at PC who is a good resource for the type research field that I am interesting in. We discussed about school, work and the kind of research that I want to do. After discussion, I told him that I would like to do something that has to do with genes in drosophila. So, he showed me a bunch of experiments on drosophila to look at and have an idea of what I want to do. He also gave me an article on Genetic approaches to learning in fruit flies and some videos of experiments. After looking through all these experiments, I decided to focus on fruit flies and learning.

In this area, Dr. Josh Dubnau of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory did the T-Maze experiment to test the memories in fruit flies. After the experiment, it turned out that flies can learn. They can form a short term memory and also a long term memory if they are trained for a long period of time. To conclude his experiment, Dr Josh Dubnau stated that, “We're beginning to uncover the fact that many of the genes that are important for memory in flies are probably also important for memory in distantly related animals, even humans”.

For me, this experiment is amazing and I probably be doing something similar for my internship to learn more about fruit flies and their brain.

Here is the video of the experiment