Fly collection

The course is arriving to an end. The students are working on their own projects, doing experiments and searching scientific literature to develop their proposals. Going around the class and asking them you can see how they are getting it. If you ask, at the beginning they hesitate. If you let them talk, the story starts to make sense. They just need a bit of guidance. Sometimes they make mistakes, who hasn’t! But that’s science: you do it, you do it again, and again and again, and in the end you can do it almost with your eyes closed. Tomorrow they will start the presentations and on Saturday everything will come to an end. And end with promise to be continued: more flies, some molecular biology, plans for the future of East Africa… I can’t believe this is over.

I’ve taken the chance today to play around with the pictures I took over a week ago with the intention of illustrating the work with flies which, in the end, is the reason for us to be here. The pictures are a bit pathetic due to the precarious photographic technique (my small digital camera looking through the ocular of the dissection scope) and the equally precarious shape of the scope (no complains! they were very valuable donations!). Excuse the low quality of the pictures and take the chance, if at all possible, to learn something.

A cornerstone of fly work is differentiating males and females since the arranged crosses are at the base of genetics. Males have their bottom black and they have two small black structures in the anterior pair of legs called sex combs. They use these combs in the sexual courtship of the female.

In order to make sure that we get only the progeny that we want out of each cross, it is fundamental that the females are virgins.  Virgin flies are distinguishable from the older ones because their pigmentation is lighter and in their abdomen the meconium is still visible. They are frequently bigger than older flies because they are like inflated.

The light pigmentation of the virgins is obvious even without the scope and it’s easier to recognize when there are older flies around to compare them with. You should be careful, though, when working with flies of different genetic background since there are mutations that make the pigmentation lighter and old flies can look like virgins to the untrained eye.

 

The flies that have just hatched are very easy to recognize since they still have their wings folded and they are not bloated.

When we need many many flies to set up a cross (because we need a lot of progeny for our next experiment) it is necessary to work with the help of temperature to get the most out of the clock.  The optimum temperature for fly development is 25ºC. At this temperature the flies reach sexual maturity in six hours (I could maybe say eight, but I prefer not to risk it). When kept at 19ºC, development slows down and that time doubles. The maths are easy: if you want every fly that comes out of a tube (or bottle), the usual is to collect them early in the morning, after lunch and right before you leave in the evening. You keep them at 25ºC during the day and at 19ºC at night, and you don’t want to leave early to make sure that they are still virgins in the morning. Taking into account that a female can lay around 500 eggs, if you collect all the progeny from a cross with four or five females, with the normal proportion of 1:1 male:females, you can see how in a week you can get a considerable number of flies. Most of the times you don’t need so much hassle.

If we can’t collect virgins so often and we want to increase the number of flies available for the cross we can select females at the late pupal stage. It’s more difficult to see them, but the same sex combs present in the adult male can be seen at this stage. I know the cartoons are pathetic but I already said I am no artist, right?  This technique is also useful to select males and females that need to be kept isolated from the very beginning for a behavioral experiment.

Visitors

Something is growing in our tubes…

and it’s leaving the flies petrified, hehe.

What a blast

A student told me this morning, with a wide smile on his face, that we have changed completely the way he thinks about research. Mastercard can’t pay this

Urban landcape

 

I don’t remember in which town I recorded this on the way from Ishaka to Mbarara, but this is a pretty typical town around here. The companies choose the most ignominious colors to paint houses and people let them do it for a bit of money. The architecture is another thing that has me thinking. I just can’t see how those saloon-like cement blocks became the most popular building.

Return trip to Bunyonyi

I spent the weekend at the Byoona Amagara resort on lake Bunyonyi. Well, I should probably say I spent the weekend going to and coming back from that place, since I was there from dusk on Saturday to 1pm on Sunday. The resort is a peaceful well maintained environmentally friendly and socially responsible island retreat with the best food I have tried since I set foot on this continent.

The views from the top of the lake are great. The weather didn’t allow for much enjoyment, but it clearly has possibilities. The place where I took this picture was way out of our budget, but we managed to appear when the rain started and they let us stay under the roof long enough to take some photos.

In order to get to the island we took a “taxi”, a matatu, a car ride from a friend of a friend of a friend, and a canoe. On the way back we opted for the motor-boat, a taxi (almost a real one this time), again a matatu and another “taxi”.

The “taxi” is an overloaded car that covers medium range distances (often the same itinerary back and forth) and drops and picks people up on the way. We were so lucky that ours run out of gas just a few kilometers before our destination and the guy had to take a boda, the motorcycle version of a taxi, to go and get some to the closest gas station. The “taxis” are usually in determined points of the city and between the driver and the two or three partners that are around shouting the destination and pushing people around to get it full one has to be alert not to get in the wrong one.

The bodas remind me of the motorcycles that men used to ride in my parents village. There are hundreds of them, everybody uses them, and they can transport just about everything, including coffins (I hope it was empty!).

The matatu is an incredibly overloaded van, but overloaded to a point that got me thinking way too much about the possibilities of this country to go anywhere if they don’t begin respecting themselves a bit. I don’t know how those thing still work. The incredible number of passengers, the crappy road, the continues stops, the big pieces of “luggage” on the roof, nothing makes sense. I kept thinking it was going to crack open any minute. But it didn’t, and it’s probably still doing the same route, up and down again, loading and unloading people as if they were sheep. I am beginning to think that animals have a better life than people around here. With so much rain, they are never short of food, and I can’t see them putting a cow on top of each other to get them to the next city. In fact, I don’t think they move them around at all.

I was on the second row of passengers (in front of the bars are the driver and 2 passengers). Two more rows were behind me. Each one of them had more people than the designer thought there should be. None of the passengers complained or even blinked when the second driver/ cashier told them to squeeze. In Rome do as Romans: I didn’t complained (not too openly at least), but laughed, indeed I laughed, we just couldn’t believe it.

The car ride was… something. After the matatu experience it was nice to seat in a car with the right number of passengers. It was a good and powerful 4x4, so the bumps on the road were nothing more than an annoyance. The unexpected finding was at the other side of the window. Seeing little kids smashing rocks with hummers that were almost bigger than themselves by the road is not something I was ready to digest when going to a touristy area in the middle of nowhere. Is not that this is a country of contrasts: everything is dusty, everything is cracking, nothing is luxurious, but there are people that do worse than others. Here in Ishaka the hospital and the Medical School keep the business going and it seems that everybody is more or less able to get their share. Stepping outside of the fish bowl was an experience. I guess I saw the place I came to see. Our day by day has somehow fallen into a routine and everything feels pretty normal, but I am in Africa after all.

Some of us were more relaxed than others on the canoe ride, but we all had fun.

Canoeing to the island was really nice, except for the couple of water-scared individuals of the group, I suppose. We got to see a bit of the low fog coming out of the lake at sunset and arrive to the island with enough light to see our steps. We had, as I said, the best food ever. They are slow, that’s true, but a bit of African tea helped keeping us warm while the bravest sang at the rhythm of the Spanish guitar (played by a German). In the morning we enjoyed some bird-watching while having a great breakfast, both for the food and the location. We went for a nice walk on the island and kind of got lost but the place is small, so we soon were back and ready to start all over again.

People have some sense of humor around here.

When we arrived back to the hotel it was hard to look at the same menu again. I have been meaning to talk about the food choices for a while. I’ll do it soon. The post will be much shorter than this.

Inspired

I arrived last night from my weekend adventure. I’ll write about it soon, but something crossed my path and got my attention this morning. A good friend of mine sent the link to a blog post that put words to my thoughts. It’s one of those rare occasions in which I feel someone has been reading my mind; someone actually feels the way I do! I couldn’t let it go lost. No matter where I am or what I am doing, I am still a radical scholar.

Be that radical anyway. Be the scholar you think you should be, bringing your whole self to the table, finding your passion and making it your scholarship, and having a plan that will help you become a leader in your field.

Kate Clancy - The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar – Scientific American blog Context and Variation

I greatly recommend reading the whole post. Is not that long, and it’s as inspiring as a canoe trip on the waters of the lake Bunyonyi through sunset into dusk.

The university

I went for a walk today and took some pictures so you can have a more realistic idea of how things are around here.

 

The road to the university. The picture is taken from the entrance (looking towards the main road), so the university is at my back.

 

 

 

The entrance.

 

 

 

 

The guards’ house.

 

 

 

 

From the door of our laboratory we see the pharmacy block (yes, that thing on the lower-right corner is a cow).

 

 

 

 

 

Our lab with the students arriving (very) slowly after lunch.

 

 

 

Our corridor. The area where the students are is where the computer class is located. The router is there and it seems it’s there where you can best connect to the university network. I still haven’t managed to make it work in my computer. Hopefully we have Sadiq’s phone, which can be a portable modem. The connection is still crappy, especially in the afternoon, but we can take it with us to the hotel.

 

 

The computer class. The tables have the surface made of glass and the computers are underneath so the students can see the screen and the board. That’s so smart! The can take notes and pay attention to the teacher, and! they can’t hide behind the screens to sleep, facebooking, etc…

 

 

I took the picture of the lecture from a hidden corner but it still shows how things are here, right? What I don’t understand is why are they wearing the labcoat. Wait! They are in Medical School, that’s why :o)

 

 

 

 

THE shop. If you don’t find it here you have to go to the village to look for it.

 

 

 

 

The basketball court.

 

 

 

 

The printing store?

 

 

 

 

 

You have seen how sunny it was when I walked around, right? Take a look to the weather one hour later.

The students

At the end of the students presentations we asked each of them to do a little drawing representing their project on the board of the lab. The final result can be seen in the picture.

Abba has studied the correlation between the relative length of the index and ring finger, whish is determined by age 2 and correlates with the prenatal exposure to androgens (and with the tendency to aggressive behaviors!), and other traits that are determined later on as the diameter of the wrist and hip circumferences. His passion is the study of memory retrieval.

Paulin is studying in Cameroon the potential of a plant (I’ll keep the name so no-one can steal his idea) in the war against those ticks that martyrize the cattle (and anyone who shares the path with them, I am the proof of that [I can testify that they share space with fleas, no ticks, my mistake]).

Lucille works evaluating the action of insecticides in Tanzania, doing lab and field studies to analyze their efficacy and safety.

Ngattu studies malaria, tuberculosis and meningitis from an epidemiologic point of view and searches for a better and quicker diagnose to reduce the risk of contagion.

Nelson works in Malawi analyzing the efficacy of malaria drugs in pregnant women and uses genetic markers to study the resistance to drugs in Plasmodium (the little creature that generates the disease). He is already thinking about using Drosophila as a model to study malaria and the resistance to drugs.

Sam has studied the torsion angle of the humerus (the representation of the anatomy department of the Kampala International University –KIU- , co-organizer of the course, is noticeable). Using this course as a start-up, a Masters in Anatomy and Neurobiology is going to begin at KIU, and Sam wants to continue his research comparing the number of synapsis in lab animals vs animals from the wild. Will wild animals have more synapsis? and, if they do, will they be smarter?

Steven is characterizing the proteins involved in odor perception in tse-tse fly and is very interested in the possibility of using Drosophila as a model system.

Jimmy, another anatomist, has studied the epidemiology of atherosclerosis (the deposit of fat plaques in the arteries).

Yunusa, the youngster of the course, is still thinking what to do for his Master’s project. He has a great passion for public health and wants to do a PhD in a good institution studying mental dementia in HIV patients.

Iliya Ezekiel is interested in the study of epilepsy and sleep. Before the course, he was thinking in an experimental setting to study spatial learning in rats. Now he is considering a change of system.

Sylviane, also from Cameroon, is analyzing the effect of traditional remedies to treat epilepsy.

Maureen, who has come all the way from Kenya with her little baby, studies the epidemiology of diverse diseases and the distribution of the different mosquito species that transmit them.

Okpanachi Alfred is studying diabetes type II.

Goji has studied the effect of an African plant extract in the level of glucose in the blood using rats to which they have induced hyperglycemia.

Bolaji Samuel wants to study the effects of the combined use of alcohol and cannabis and he is also studying the possibility of using Drosophila as a model.

We still have to hear from Joseph Oloro, although from the conversations that we have had this days I know it has something to do with erectile dysfunction.

(Students, please, forgive me if I misplaced something or if trying to summarize I simplified your work so much that the description is almost wrong)

When the sun comes out

We've had a couple of cloudy and wet days but there is sun shine at some pointeveryday. When that happens, it shows the colors of sky and hearth with an intensity that could well inspire the brushstrokes of an artist. I am no artist, but I am glad that technology allows me to share the digital version of what my eyes see and, even if it's in a clumpsy way, the written version of what my brain perceives.

Not “just” flies

In case there is someone I haven’t told yet, the reason/ excuse to come precisely to Uganda, precisely now, was the opportunity to participate in the Drosophila neurogenetics course Uganda 2011 that has been organized by Lucía Prieto Godino and Sadiq Yusuf, both of them doctors (putting the title before still sounds weird to me). The course is for graduate students or more advanced researchers and it has a level that is simply impressive. Isa and Lola taught the initial introductory lessons and Lucía and Tom are showing them what Drosophila and other insects can contribute to the neurobiology field. I have filled some gaps with a bit of fly genetics and I have a couple of classes left that are not at all for beginners. As said, a very high level. The students are responding wonderfully and show an interest hard to find in other latitudes where studying is more a punishment or a pastime than a real motivation.

During the last two days the students have presented briefly the issues they have been working on and talked about how they can use what they are learning these days. Seeing that after a week and a half most of them already have ideas of experiments that they can do with Drosophila that can help them in their research on malaria, both fighting the mosquitos and the study of the pathology, on tze-tze fly, diabetes, epilepsy, the use of cannabinoids… was a moving experience. Seeing them torture a little grasshopper to measure the action potentials of their muscles when they tickled it wasn’t so enjoyable but, what are you going to do, you learn to walk walking and electrophysiology is best learned by doing electrophysiology.

Flies, the main players of the event, we have them everywhere in trays full of tubes, pots for them to lay eggs and plates where the larvae are growing. On the end of the bench that greats us to the lab there is a growing community of plastic pots with the most varied insects, grasshoppers, mantis, wasps, cockroaches, and many others waiting their turn to get on the stage and get their currents measured. They collected most of them during a field trip with the students the other day. Others, we find them in the lab as the days go by. Others are brought by the students, professors and assistants that collaborate with the organization of the course: everybody contributes with something here, even if it’s with bugs.

In the picture, the snail goes for an expedition on the roof of the brown grasshopper house. What you see further back on the right is a wasp with the size of a thumb. Scary…

Pouring

Half an hour ago, it was sunny outside

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Ps: As you can imagine, with that kind of rain the power went down and with it the internet connection. Today is cloudy from first hour in the morning, so we’ll see what falls from the heights. One of our guardians (because everybody in the organizing committee worries so much for us that I’ve named them the guardians) told us the local expression for the phenomenon: it rains elephants and hippos. I don’t think it’s an exageration…

Work place

1) Fresh tubes with sugar-based food that our Drosophila love.

2) Lamp or light source, which needs a push at the bulb-door to start running but gives a nice steady light until the electricity of the whole city goes down (every day at some point, especially if pours like yesterday).

3) Flies sleeping after breathing fly snooze, a stinky but effective way of putting flies to sleep without the headaches that ether gave me in my genetics class as an undergrad. Once they are sleeping, we can select males/ females, virgins/ old flies, and we can set up the experiments we need.

4) Since we don’t have a pad, the post-it pack is doing the job. One could work without it but, after a while hitting the bench with plastic tubes, the noise gets annoying and, sometimes, a bad move can mean a broken tube and goodbye dear flies.

5) THE brush, my friend, which needed some bandage work after arrival from California but is doing a great job.

6) The dissection scope, old and misaligned, but enough to get the virgins out of the tube before they do anything naughty with the wrong male

7) Trays with flies waiting to be taken care of or just enjoying life while we let them reproduce

Napkins?

Nope! Help yourself to the tap

Under cover

After working a bit in the lab and say hi and bye to Isa and Lola (the faculty that taught the first classes and were spending a few days in a safari lodge) we’ve headed into town for lunch. We have been the center of all looks in the afternoon walk. Interesting place… We were sitting in a terrace and I have warned the troop, well, the other two, that the clouds were looking bad. I guess I haven’t insisted enough. As son as we’ve started walking half an hour later, it begun pouring. The locals started running and so did we. No time to get the raincoat out. I did that under the small roof that we shared with a few others, while looking, worried, how the water evacuation channel filled up. Now I know why everything is so green…

Final stop, Ishaka

One day and I am already behind with the English version of the account… Not that you missed much. This will hopefully get easier on Monday when I get connection to the University wireless, but we’ll see. The old trick of writing at night and uploading in the morning will have to be enough most of the time. Hopefully the night difference gives me quite an advantage there.

The trip was long, as expected. The first impression left a few words bouncing in my head: hospitality, mud, green, horn, left.

Hospitality. If those who welcomed me are even average in this country, these people are the very definition of hospitality. They picked me up from the airport, opened the door of their house, trusted me to hold their family, made me feel safe, warm, in company, and not only gave me snacks for the next part of the trip but they also arranged a chaperone, who took the same long (and I mean time and energy consuming, not so much the distance after what I had done the days before) bus trip to get to Ishaka.

Mud. When I arrived to Kampala it was pouring. It’s rains season and the unpaved roads (most of them) seemed streams more than streets and left me thinking that Africa is made of clay…

Green. It might be just the season, but the whole place is covered of green, everything is green! That which is not made of mud, of course.

Horn. The intrepid bus driver used a very musical horn to let the world know that the chance of a few miles of good road was not going to go unnoticed. Somehow it worked and the traffic seemed to open. I have learned now that each bus has its own typical horn and that people recognize them by it.

Left. Here they drive on the left, although that seems just too generous of a description after seeing them in action…

I am alive and healthy and already participating in the classes. Tomorrow we have to collect flies! Good old times that were not always easy: those little ones love to be ready to hatch when you are ready to have a nice weekend.

Oops!

I just realized the melatonin that I brought to fight the jet-lag is sitting in the pocket of my jacket at my parents house. For once I had remembered to take it with me! My usual me messing things up...

Count down

One last night in Barcelona and tomorrow I'll fly... to Uganda...