Instructify

March 26, 2009

If you ever studied biology in college, or perhaps even high school, you probably had a chance to perform some fruit fly crosses. Fruit flies are great model organisms for studying Mendelian inheritance — they’re easy to grow, they reproduce quickly, and they have many easy-to-identify mutations. Unfortunately, live fruit flies poses problems in your average middle- or high-school classroom. Their food gets sticky and the flies get stuck in it, you have to use nasty chemicals to put them to sleep before examining them, and worst of all, once your new adults start emerging, you have to ‘virgin’ the flies every eight hours or so. This means you have to separate the females into their own vials to ensure pure genetic crosses. This is no fun in the wee hours of the morning. Luckily, with the Virtual Drosophila Lab, you can perform easy fruit fly crosses without these problems (and without having to explain to your principal why there is a sudden infestation of escaped fruit flies in your classroom).

In the Virtual Drosophila Lab, as a teacher, you can get your own log-in and set up class accounts. Then, the students use a class code to create their own student accounts. After the students have accounts, they can begin making genetic crosses with virtual fruit flies. There are several mutations from which to choose ranging from your basic dominant and recessive traits, to sex-linked traits, to lethal traits. The traditional two-week growth period is turned into about ten seconds, and the computer automatically separates your offspring into phenotypic and gendered groups to analyze your data.

In addition to letting students experience more real-life genetics work, this website offers advantages to teachers in the lab report section. Your students can create their lab reports within the program, entering the data they’ve saved as they go. And then, you can grade their lab reports right in the program using a pre-made rubric. Or, if you want, you can modify or enter your own rubric. The website will also show you the education standards that it meets, and once you have your own teacher account, you can access a printed version of the rubrics and an instruction manual.

All in all, this website makes Drosophila experimentation accessible to educators and students . You can do it with your middle- or high-school students, and you can avoid the uncomfortable discussion about why you have to virgin the flies at two in the morning. -REBECCAH HAINES

Virtual Drosophila Lab

Teacher Account Creation for Virtual Drosophila Lab

Watch Genetics in Action: DNA from the Beginning