Now you see it, now you don’t see it

The course is over and we are finishing up packing and leaving everything ready for the KIU students to use it in their research projects. As Sadiq says, this is only the beginning. I really hope it is. This kids have a great potential apart from a lot of motivation and they deserve the opportunity to demonstrate what they are capable of.

After sleeping as much Sunday as I could, the week starts with the accumulated laundry, planning the visits of the next few weeks, switching my mind to trip to Africa mode. Before I leave the course completely behind – although I doubt I am going to be able to do so – I am leaving you here a few pictures of how it was and how it is now the stage where the play took place, knowing that everything will shortly find it’s more permanent location in the new research laboratory of the Western campus of KIU when the equipment that we brought joins the equipment for molecular biology that has already reached Monbasa. The beginning of a new era in this corner of the world…

                 

      

Some students working on their lab classes or their mini-projects.

   

All the material waiting on a bench to get ready to leave. Most of all this is staying and will be the foundations of the new research lab.

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

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)

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…

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