My First Week Amidst the Fruit Flies
This past week has been a whirlwind of excitement, stress, and new friendships. I moved into LSU’s East Campus Apartments on Monday, June 4. The apartments are really nice. There are four bedrooms and two bedrooms each share a bathroom. There is a large living area that separates the pair of bedrooms and a fully furnished kitchen. Naomi Will, a Centenary student also participating in the LBRN program is sharing my bathroom with me. My other roommates, Spring and Rita, are wonderful as well. Spring is from Chalmette and attends Nicholls State University and Rita is from Orlando and attends Xavier.
Monday night the LBRN program and two other sister programs held a welcome dinner for all of the participants and their mentors. While there I met up with Chase Lambert, another Centenary student participating in the program and Tranole who is a student from Southern and actually went to middle school with me. We had a lot of fun and were able to meet some of the other mentors and students participating in the program.
On Tuesday morning we all had to gather in an auditorium to learn about the three different research programs, a little bit of orientation, and about safety in the laboratory. Afterwards I headed off for my first day as a biological researcher! I met with Dr. Pat DiMario and he walked me through the lab. I met his graduate student, Raphael, and began doing research on different tests that can detect apoptosis in larval tissue of the species of fruit fly we are working with.
On Wednesday I arrived bright and early to Dr. DiMario’s lab at 8:30 am in order to catch the fruit flies as they emerged from their pupa stages. Dr. DiMario had me knock out the adult fruit flies with carbon dioxide in order to take them out of the vials and handle them. I’d then place them on a screen with carbon dioxide coming up from the bottom and push them around in order to identify them as male or female. Once I had arranged the females together, I had to identify what we call “virgin” females which means these are newly formed adult females. I then removed the virgin females and placed them in a vial with adult males of another transgenic cross in order to grow my own line of fruit flies. This has actually been my favorite part of working in the lab. It is so interesting to see the fruit flies underneath a dissecting microscope and to learn more about them.
That evening Naomi and I decided to take a run around one of the lakes on LSU’s campus. The perimeter around the lake is somewhere between 4 and 5 miles. I am happy to say that I ran most of it. Afterwards, we got dressed and headed over to the Mellow Mushroom for some pizza! It was so crowded that we got our food to go and ate it at one of Naomi’s friend’s apartments. After we finished eating, we headed back to the Mellow Mushroom for karaoke night. It was so crowded! We had a lot of fun, though. It was great to get away from the stresses of the lab and just laugh.
On Thursday Dr. DiMario taught me how to dissect the fruit fly larvae to harvest some imaginal tissues in order to test out the apoptosis kit we had ordered. Dissecting the larvae was really weird because I had to pull them apart with tweezers while they were still alive! I was able to successful isolate imaginal tissues and we tested them with dyes from the apoptosis kit. Unfortunately, the tests were unsuccessful and we had to think of another way to test for apoptosis in these tissues. That was my first failure in a laboratory. I learned that you are going to try experiments and they are not going to work. You just have to get up, dust yourself off, and try something else.
On Friday, I helped Dr. DiMario’s high school lab student with her projects while I waited for my larvae to grow. We did a lot of things that I had the chance to do at Centenary in Cell Biology lab. Afterwards, I met up with Chase and Naomi and we went to Best Buy and Whole Foods Market. We ate lunch/dinner at Whole Foods and then headed over to Cold Stone Ice Cream for dessert! Later that evening we went to one of the many movie theatres in Baton Rouge and saw Ocean’s Thirteen. We had a lot of fun hanging out with everyone after our first week of research.
I woke up early on Saturday morning and did a bit of house cleaning. Around three in the afternoon a whole bunch of people participating in the three different research programs got together on the LSU parade grounds and we played a game of Ultimate Frisbee. It was so hot that we only played until a team scored five points. We cleaned up and met everyone at Great Wall which is a really, really big Chinese buffet. The food was pretty good and it was great talking to the other researchers because I had not met some of them before.
LSU is SUCH a big campus. I easily get lost walking around. I really enjoy the fact that Centenary has such a small campus. It’s easy to get around and one doesn’t feel overwhelmed by the size of everything. LSU’s summer residence life is also very different than Centenary’s. I have no idea who my RA is! At Centenary, the RA has a major presence in their residents’ lives. Here, they are almost absent. LSU does have a lot of great things to offer, though. Their life sciences building has a lot of great equipment I’ve only read about. I’m really enjoying my research experience thus far. Pictures of my adventures will be on their way shortly.
