Thursday 7 June 2012

Well travelled flies

I had a gig to attend work-related fly retrieval mission yesterday for a student in the lab. My old lab had a mutant he needs, so I selflessly decided to go and get them for him.
While I was there it seemed important to maintain my academic networks so I had coffee with several of them. I then decided to take the flies to the pub to meet some other friends. This was obviously a public outreach as several of my friends had never seen Drosophila before and were excited to see that they had curly wings and that they had a lot of food in their vials.
I then went to see The Chromatics and Neon Indian gig but only so that I could meet with another scientist to discuss work with him. As they searched my bag I was worried what they'd do if they saw the flies but luckily they didn't check the side pocket (a useful thing to know in future). The temperatures at the gig were quite high and I grew slightly concerned as one of the fly lines had a hshid on them. Hshid is a genetic trick that will kill any fly carrying that gene at temperatures above 37 degrees. I'm sure you can understand how this could be a bad thing. I'm not sure how they'd respond to the noise but I thought exposing the flies to a bit of culture couldn't be a bad thing.
I then travelled back to Bristol with the flies still looking fairly happy - they definitely didn't look as tired as I felt. The last leg of our epic journey involved getting absolutely drenched on the way into work. Luckily the flies were far dryer than I was once we had reached our final destination.

Anyway, I just thought it was prudent to show how I will go above and beyond in the name of science. Someone has to :)

No comments:

Post a Comment