Re: Fruit flies and temperature sensitive mutations

[George & Melanie Caruso <caraway at erienet_net>]

After seeing various comments from others who have raised fruit flys as well as
comments from the supplier of my original culture I believe my problem was
created by the infiltration of wild winged fruit flies. My fine screened
openings on my cuture jars was obviously no fine enough. I bleive it is
important to have the foam plugs which makes it almost mpossible for wild flies
to ruin a culture. I ordered 36 vials with tops and foam plugs. this should
solve the problem.
George

Brown_D at pcfnotes1_wustl.edu wrote:

> George Slusarczuk wrote:
>
> I seem to remember, that one strain of "wingless" fruit flies (actually
> "vestigial wing", because they do have rudimentary wings, but can not
> fly) CAN produce flying offspring if the incubation temperature is high.
> The same culture, when kept cooler, again produces "flightless" flies.
>
> These have a temperature sensitive mutation--if the temperature is cool
> enough, the flies may be mutant appearing, but have a normal appearance
> when raised at a warm temperature; other temperature sensitive mutations
> work the opposite way--they can look normal at cool temps and abnormal at
> higher temps.
>
> I had a close encounter with this phenomena when I was doing a short
> rotation in a fruit fly lab as a graduate student:  my main project was to
> do a couple of generations of crosses to help out another person in the lab
> develop a strain he needed for an important experiment.  If you want to do
> the crosses correctly, you have to separate the newly hatched male and
> female flies within a certain number of hours or the females will mate with
> their siblings.  However, if you put them in a cooler incubator, you get a
> few more hours' grace period before they can mate, so it's easier to
> collect the needed virgin females for the next mating.  I used this
> chilling overnight quite often, and was distressed to find out at almost
> the end of the rotation that I was getting flies with mutant wings--meaning
> I'd picked the wrong flies, in retrospect because one of the phenotypes I
> was following in the cross was a temperature sensitive wing mutation.....
>
> Diane Brown
> brown_d at kids_wustl.edu
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