Because I discovered that the mutated worms we're working with are showing less signs of well..being mutated, Julian asked me to preform a lifespan experiment without using FUDR to figure out if that was the cause of the strange results. FUDR is a chemical used to stop cell growth and this prevents the worms being observed to reproduce and infest our plates with hundreds of worm larvae. Julian has been using FUDR for many years now and it has never shown affects on the lifespan of worms but there has been a paper published which reads that FUDR may affect worms. I set up a lifespan experiment without FUDR to check if it was the source of lifespan longevity and when I checked on it the following day it looked like this.
The big clumps on the plate are colonies of contamination (bacteria).
All of my lifespan plates looked like this and so I had to discard them all (about 25 plates of 20 individually picked and placed worms).
Because now I won't have time to restart my lifespan, I've decided to take on a fluoresce project which I've watched Fred do a few times. He grows worms in plates with different dyes which illuminate the pharyngeal bulb and he takes pictures of them under a special microscope. I'll be analyzing pictures to see if the mutated gas-1 strain compares to previous results to make sure the gas-1 are truly gas-1... addressing what I had found with my lifespan.
No comments:
Post a Comment