placement presentation

1. My Placement year
of working in a fly
lab at the University
of Sheffield
By Emily Denham

2. Overview of the fly lab:
- The fly lab I worked in was part of the school of bioscience at the university of sheffield. The PI
of the lab is Mirre Simons.
- We use fruit flies (drosophila melanogaster) to all the research.
- The focused research in the lab was around ageing;
- One focus was looking into life threatening diseases that were linked to ageing such as
dementia. Diseases like dementia are still highly misunderstood, yet so common.
- Another big focus was looking at the link between ageing and diet. With flies, it have been
discovered that if there is a protein reduction in their diet then there is a sudden drop in
mortality risk.
- There was also a very small team of us working in the lab so good teamwork and
communication was essential for running the lab.

3. Why use drosophila melanogaster as a model
organism?
- Millions of flies can be stored in a small space, which we can not do with animals like mice.
- We can look at a flies whole life span and look into generations within a few months due to
the lifespan of flies being so short.
- It is a lot cheaper to maintain flies in a lab.
- Drosophila have corresponding genes for around 75% of human that cause diseases. With
this we can manipulate these genes and look at pathways linked to specific diseases.
- They allow us to study the cellular and molecular mechanisms linked to diseases.
- For many different species of drosophila, the genome and transcriptome has been
sequenced which means there is a huge amount of information on fruit flies.

4. The projects I took on whilst on my placement year:
- The first project I started was was looking at a gene called CHMP2B. The mutant form of this gene is linked to a
form of dementia called frontotemporal dementia. I used fruit flies as an animal model to show the effect of
this mutant gene, through taking eye pictures and looking at the effect this gene has on the eye. Through this I
looked into a method of targeted gene expression called GAL4. This use of targeted gene expression allowed
for the mutant CHMP2B gene to be expressed only in the eye.
- I also did lifespan work. I performed a demography experiment to work out the lifespan of unknown species of
fruit flies.
- I also did a lot of phosphate assay work. I looked at the difference in phosphate levels between different lines
and also look at the different phosphate levels when the flies were on different diets.

5. My role in the lab:
- My key role was helping maintain the lab and I was an extra pair of hands if there was a big scale
experiment was going on.
- With helping maintain the lab, I did jobs such as washing cage parts for the demography
experiments, I was involved in cooking specialised media for fly food, helped maintain fly stocks,
ect.
- Later on in my placement, summer master students join and I took on the role of being their port
of call. I showed them basic skills that were required for working in the lab and I answered any
questions they had.

6. Skills that I gained:
- Organisation and time management
- Planning my own projects/experiments
- Communication and being able to present results correctly
- Dissection work- dissecting the eye and gut of flies under a microscope
- I wide range of lab skills such as pippetting, using a centrifuge, using a plate reader, using
standard microscope every day, using a fluorescent microscope, using microscopic
cameras, using -80oC freezer, cooking fly media for food, ect.
- Also used analytical software such as R and matlab to analyse results.
- I was also a part of the process of researching into new equipment that was needed for a
new project (microinjection).

7. why I would recommend doing a placement year:
- I have gained so much confidence in how to perform lab skills which is what I wanted as I did have
much lab practice before due to covid.
- With the independence I had on my placement year, I was able to even plan my own projects.
- Due to me working with live samples, I had to perfect my time management skills as a lot of
experiments I was doing was age dependent.
- I also had a lot of fun and I worked with some really lovely people that gave me a lot of support and
help throughout my placement year.
- Creates opportunities; with my placement they offered me a paid summer job after, you can also use
the opportunity to build your network and make connections.
- I was also educated on the different paths I could take after university.

8. Thank you for listening