Laboratory for the Physics of Life Thomas Gregor, Professor of Physics, Princeton University

Here are the various lab duties. Next to each one you’ll find who’s assigned to them.

The people involved are: Feng (F), Hernan (H), Julien (J), Eric (E), Allyson (A), Thomas (T).

Lab duties consist of (tentatively):

• Wash and autoclave glassware (H)
• Refill and autoclave tips and E-tubes (J)
• Chemistry / sink area cleanup (A)
  • Get rid of everything on the bench, wipe clean with detergent/ethanol
• Bio- and chemical waste disposal (A)
• Fly clean-up (F)
  • Get rid of everything on the fly bench, wipe clean with ethanol
  • Clean yeast pot in the fridge and make new yeast
• CO2 refill (F)
• Wash cups, funnels and vials (E)
• Get supplies from the stockroom or Fisher (E)
  • Kimwipes and paper towels
  • Pipette tips and Eppendorf tubes
  • Gloves
• Get fly food (everybody! responsible official: F)
• Flip stock collection (F, T, H)
• Holding everybody’s nerves together (T)

We will be discussing the following paper:

Nusslein-Volhard, C. and E. Wieschaus (1980). “Mutations affecting segment number and polarity in Drosophila.” Nature 287(5785): 795-801. (Nusslein-Volhard1980)

Some other papers that might be of interest are:

Nusslein-Volhard, C., E. Wieschaus, et al. (1984). “Mutations Affecting the Pattern of the Larval Cuticle in Drosophila-Melanogaster .1. Zygotic Loci on the 2nd Chromosome.” Wilhelm Rouxs Archives of Developmental Biology 193(5): 267-282. (Nusslein-Volhard1984-Part1, Nusslein-Volhard1984-Part2)

We’ll try to include talking points in this post before our meeting. It could be fun to have everybody participating in putting together those talking points.

Some interesting things to discuss:

• How do you screen for lethal mutants? What’s a good crossing scheme? Why are balancers key here?
• What’s the difference between an allele and a locus?
• Why do they talk about homeotic genes? What’s the difference between determining the existence and positioning of a segment and its identity?
• How can you tell which segment you lost if you can’t see it?
• When you do a screen how do you know when to give up, when you’ve seen most of the stuff there is to see? This is shown in fig. 5 of the 1984 paper.

Chromosomal mapping:

During our discussions the work by Sturtevant and Morgan came up. Here’s a link to the paper with an explanation of their reasoning and the genetic details. It’s fun to try to generate your own map from their data!

SturtevantMapPaper

This is a list of antibodies and optimal conditions put together by Reba in Eric’s lab:

Wieschaus lab antibody list