Category Archives: Fly stuff

Taking the stress out of conference prep

Fly stuff, Mentoring, Reflection, Systems

The Annual Drosophila Research Conference is coming up and I’m busy helping 4 research students prepare for their poster presentations. Because I’m admittedly not great with enforcing student deadlines, my usual MO is to have everyone work at their own pace and then hurriedly deal with the fallout (i.e. 11th hour editing). This year I decided to try something new, that would hopefully prevent stress levels from topping the charts…and it worked! 

I know that many of my colleagues have efficient systems in place already (and may be wondering how I made it this far without them), but if you’re looking for a success story on streamlining workflow, read on.

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Home office? Meet the home lab

Fly stuff

While flies are an amazing model organism for so many different reasons, they need to be kept alive. So when lockdown happened last spring, “what about my flies?” was a question in the fly community.  So many researchers brought their fly stocks home with them, hosting their new guests in bathrooms, spare bedrooms, and garages. I luckily was authorized to go into campus every couple weeks to make food and flip stocks, but a set of essential stocks still became our new pandemic roommates. 

Later in the summer, I still had limited lab access (and child care), but was itching to get some of our work up and running. Enter the creation of the home fly lab.

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Fly food cooking school

Fly stuff, PUI

When I first set up my lab, I realized that many things that worked for my large, R1 postdoc lab weren’t going to work for me in my new environment. One of the most important processes was making fly food. My first decision was to use pre-portioned 1L food packets from Genesse to save on time and possible measuring errors for my undergrad food makers (we use the Bloomington Formula). The next challenge was how to cook the fly food without an industrial-sized kettle. The size wasn’t a problem because I only needed to make small batches, but the equipment was a trial and error process…

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