Cort continues his Optogenetics Odyssey in this week’s installment of “Pretty Fly for a White Guy”

Hello, again. I’m Cort, the fly guy (I also do research with fruit flies) at Backyard Brains.

Since the last time I posted I’ve made significant progress in my research! IT WORKS!!!

In the above video what you’re seeing is one of the flies I’ve bred having its proboscis extension activated with an LED. Optogenetics works! Now that I have it work, I’ve been busy playing with the new “flyscope” and raising more transgenic (organism with dna put into it from another organism, in this case the light sensitive protein) flies for my experiments. In order to breed the flies that I need, I had to dive straight into a world of genetics and Fly husbandry. I spent quite a bit of time at the University of Michigan Shafer lab learning about Drosophila (fruit flies) and how to raise them.

Fly husbandry is pretty intimidating at a glance, but once you break past the complexity it really isn’t so bad. It’s common knowledge that most complex organisms undergo a process called “recombination” during meiosis (when sex cells or “gametes” are formed in the body). One of the main reasons that scientists love using fruit flies to conduct genetic experiments is (more…)

BYB Summer Camp Internships: Cort Turns Up for Optogenetics

My name is Cort Thompson and I’m one of the incredibly privileged interns working at Backyard Brains this summer. I’m an undergraduate neuroscience student at Michigan State University and this summer I am working to bring the cutting edge technique of optogenetics to the classroom while also observing the courtship behaviors and gustatory system of fruit flies as well as attempting to map the neural circuitry responsible for the regulation of the proboscis extension reflex.

First, I think a little bit of background information on optogenetics (more…)