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…