This summer I had an internship working in Paul Garrity’s behavioral biology lab at Brandeis University and conducted experiments on genetically modified common fruit fly, Drosophilia. There I learned about the important research that is being done on these fruit flies throughout the country and the burgeoning science of genetic modification that has begun dominating laboratories across the country. This research focused in on the sensory receptors that the flies use to detect changes in humidity and temperature. Using genetic modification we could manipulate which genes expressed themselves and through extensive trials could uncover which genes are integral to the sensory systems we were interested in. The work that I actually did in the lab has formed and shaped my bedrock of understanding of behavioral analysis and genetic modification. Each experiment started with defining which genes we would be isolating for that experiment. From the direction of Professor Garrity I would use the particular genotype we were focusing on across the lab and prepare at least 30 of those flies for testing. My assignment to study the effects of the genetically engineering on the flies senses was the first time I had ever genetically modified a multi-celled organism and the first time I had glimpsed the awesome power of genetic modification when it comes to animals. These are technologies that are far surpassed in their future importance with wide ranging implications for health, food production, and even, eventually the creation of human being’s lives. The research I did is a single thread in the ever increasing tapestry of genetic based research occurring now. The basics of genetic modification come from the idea that the way organisms, all living things from microbes to lions to trees, are built using certain blueprints that have a common language across all species. These blueprints are an organism’s set of Deoxyribo-Nucleic Acid, DNA, and it is this code that controls the production of proteins within a cell and thus controls that cell’s function and design. Random changes in an organisms DNA through reproduction or mutations are responsible in part for a species’ evolution but DNA can also be manipulated artificially. Humans have been selectively breeding crops and animals over hundreds of generations for millennium but it has only been in the past few decades that the technology has existed to actually tinker with the DNA of a creature. Using enzymatic proteins to splice in new DNA cells can be manipulated to have sections of foreign DNA implanted, which function seamlessly as if the material was part of the original organism. Genetic modification was extremely expensive and time consuming entering the twenty-first century, not to mention incredibly difficult to do right, which limited it to simple food projects and more novelty projects like making fish glow in the dark.
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But recently the cost, time, and difficulty of gene modification has been cut down to a 1% of what it was with the development of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR and the discovery of the protein CAS9. CAS9 is a protein that acts as a precise DNA surgeon capable of cutting out very specific segments of DNA from an animal’s chromosomes and can also be used to add in new segments of DNA. The groundbreaking discovery was that CAS9 could be programmed for any specific code of DNA. This discovery will change the way we develop and use organisms and one of the most important ways this technology will be used is to fight diseases and their vectors. That’s where my study fits into the expanding tapestry of research. The goal of the experiments I conducted were to isolate the genes that encoded for ***** sensors. Using CRISPR and a programed CAS9 protein I could eliminate sections of the Drosophilia’s genetic material. For each trial I would do this for a specific gene that we believed coded for a humidity sensory system. Once these flies were hatched and matured, I dehydrated them using dri-rite and I placed them in chambers with two sections kept at different humidities. Tracking the movements of the flies and their preference for the wet side or an indifference for either side gives a data point which can be combined with many repetitions with each genotype. These
But recently the cost, time, and difficulty of gene modification has been cut down to a 1% of what it was with the development of Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats or CRISPR and the discovery of the protein CAS9. CAS9 is a protein that acts as a precise DNA surgeon capable of cutting out very specific segments of DNA from an animal’s chromosomes and can also be used to add in new segments of DNA. The groundbreaking discovery was that CAS9 could be programmed for any specific code of DNA. This discovery will change the way we develop and use organisms and one of the most important ways this technology will be used is to fight diseases and their vectors. That’s where my study fits into the expanding tapestry of research. The goal of the experiments I conducted were to isolate the genes that encoded for ***** sensors. Using CRISPR and a programed CAS9 protein I could eliminate sections of the Drosophilia’s genetic material. For each trial I would do this for a specific gene that we believed coded for a humidity sensory system. Once these flies were hatched and matured, I dehydrated them using dri-rite and I placed them in chambers with two sections kept at different humidities. Tracking the movements of the flies and their preference for the wet side or an indifference for either side gives a data point which can be combined with many repetitions with each genotype. These