[Noisebridge-discuss] Fruit flys and YOU!

[Praveen Sinha]

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 12:05 AM, Meredith L. Patterson <
mlp at thesmartpolitenerd.com> wrote:

How does one sex fruit flies, anyway? Do they bother to keep them
> separate in labs? I'm guessing there are separate X/Y traits, but I
> haven't done the GenBank query to check yet.
>
>
http://www.eurasnet.info/education/teaching-resources/articles/sex-determination-in-drosophila-melanogaster

Keeping on the tangent, I don't know if the process has improved since my
college days, but at the time, it was a student intensive process:  keep
your fruit flies in a jar, and when you want to count, cloroform them so
they pass out for about 30 minutes, dump them out on your table and with a
pair of tweezers inspect their butts while squinting real hard to see if you
can tell whether the black spot is smaller or bigger...  If they start
moving around then you have to hurry up and dump them back in the jar and
re-cloroform before they escape all over the lab :)

VERY TEDIOUS.  Particularly since each of your colonies typically has
hundreds of fruit flies...
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