Fly feelings and feelings about flies

Last time I titled my blog 'getting to know you'. So do I know you? I was reminded today about how the 'lecture plan' has nothing to do with the 'what I would like to know plan'. What I wanted to skim, the group wanted to explore.  What I thought would provoke discussion passed quietly, and the ethical treatment of flies and how exactly dsRNAs get chopped up took center stage. Believe me when I say this is not a complaint but rather a plug for exchange and group discussion. Which reminds me- thank you for your interesting questions at the beginning of the session- Madras and Hyderabad.  

Nusslein-Volhard and Wieschaus conducted a Nobel-prize winning screen defining many genes that are required for the segmentation process in Drosophila.  The mutants they created had altered body plans and by looking at these 'broken' embryos the way a wild-type embryo is constructed emerged. A huge breakthrough for the field and a monumental forward genetic screen. I also showed Ed Lewis' amazing four-winged fly. I know we are all thinking about ethics,  in part because Dan Farrell's session on the ethical conduct of research is next week, but I didn't expect to be asked about the ethical considerations that come into play when so many fly embryos are used (well doomed) in an experiment.  Let me say straight away that I am the person who saves worms from the sidewalk on rainy days and I never met an animal I didn't like (except lions), but well flies.... I hope I answered the question sensitively because I do actually care about my flies quite a bit.  

This led to our lunch discussion and what kinds of animals feel pain- fish, frogs, cockroaches? Flies avoid odors associated with electric shocks but what does that aversion amount to? The vegetarians out number the meat eaters in the Columbus part of our class.  So then I felt bad about discussing the cow genome, because needless to say one of the driving forces behind that project is learn more about cows because they are a food product.  But at least Dominette, the DNA donor, looked fit and healthy! 

So let's stick to talking about dicing dsRNA and how you express it in one group of cells in the body and how long the double strand should be. All the things I thought would be less interesting than all the things I talked about instead!  

But I cannot resist showing you a picture of a fly with eyes all over its body. Repeating the classic experiment by my colleague Georg Halder when in 

Gehring's  lab - we make these every year in the undergraduate lab I teach!