Yesterday I started my summer placement, first I was introduced to the project and what it involves. The project seems to have many parts and a lot of people working in various things but from what I have picked up so far they are using drosophila to knock out or over express some of the genes and look at the effects these produce. They are mainly concerned with the signalling patterns that are involved in border cell migration thus they over express or knock out kinases and phosphatases. Yesterday I helped to separate drosophila males from females I learnt how to identify them under the microscope and then separate them in order to prepare them for some crosses.
Today in the morning I helped with some of the bioinformatics involved and I used BLAST to help identify and align some of the kinases. in the afternoon I was introduced to confocal microscopy and how to identify the normal cells in the different stages of developement from cells that had altered phenotypes because of the introduced changes in gene expression. I managed to identify some border cells that were delayed and some that had separated from the cluster. I think tomorrow I will be involved in disecting some egg chambers. So far so good.
Adriana
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