Drosophila Biology Science Fair Projects

Drosophila is a type of fruit fly that genetic experiments are commonly conducted on. These flies are used because the reproduce quickly and several generations of crosses can be examined each week. If you are looking for drosophila biology science fair projects then you are in luck. Below are four basic experiments that you can conduct and expand on to create your own biology science experiments.

Drosophila biology science fair projects all start with virgin flies. You can get these flies from a science store or your science teacher. To complete the following experiments you will need fly tubes set up with a food source and moisture (oatmeal and a damp paper towel), cotton balls and ether. You will also need a microscope to observe the appearance of your flies.

The most basic biology science fair projects that you can conduct with drosophila flies is to cross two purebred flies and chart what their offspring look like. In this experiment you will cross flies with dominant traits with those with recessive traits. After about a day you will put the flies to sleep with ether and observe the flies in the tube. These are the parent flies. Note the number of each type of fly you have in your tube. Throw these flies away, they already laid their eggs. The next day ether the second generation of flies. What physical traits do they have? Were your predictions correct?

The next drosophila biology science fair projects that you can conduct are called monohybrid crosses. In this experiment you will cross a hybrid drosophila fly with a purebred fly. For this experiment you will want to predict what percentage of the flies will have dominant traits and which ones will have recessive traits. Use a Punnett square to help you make your predictions.

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The next step up in experimentation is to create a dihybrid cross. In this experiment you will cross two hybrid flies and chart the results. What percentage of the second generation flies will have dominant traits and what percentage will have recessive traits? What will happen if you allow the second generation flies to breed? What will the third generation of flies look like? As you allow progressive generations to inbreed note the mutations that start to appear. Why do they appear? What advantage do these mutations have?

The final experiment option that you have with drosophila flies is to conduct epistasis experiments. These experiments will examine how different genes interact. For example, test the hypothesis that fly eye color and wing shape are linked. For this experiment you will examine several generations of drosophila making notes about their eye color and wing shape. You will then determine if there is a correlation between the two.

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