In-Person Summer Camps

Students will be taught how to use micropipettes and electronic balances. Device calibration and material transfer practices will be carried out as preparation for later molecular biology lab work.  

Students will learn the basics of fly genetics and the benefits of using Drosophila as a model system for neuroscience research.  Fly handling and genetic phenotype identification techniques will be taught. 

Students will complete the process of genotyping flies, from squashing to DNA amplification to running and analyzing a gel.  Students will also learn how to use genotyping to aid in the process of creating transgenic animals for specific research purposes. Multiple genotyping methods will be explored.

Students will explore the anatomy and organization of the central nervous system, focusing on the classification and characteristics of different neural cell types. Through hands-on activities, such as labeling sheep brain samples and using camera-mounted microscopes to image mouse brain tissue, students will learn to identify both macro- and micro-level brain structures.

Students will explore the use of optogenetic (light) and thermogenetic (temperature) stimulation to manipulate fly behavior/locomotion.  The students will run several behavior experiments and collect video recordings, which will be analyzed in later activities. 

Students will learn the technique involved in dissecting both larva and adult fly brains, intact. After successful removal, students will be able to visualize neuronal cell morphology using the fluorescent microscopes. A lot of practice time will be provided to perfect this challenging skill! 

Basic Python scientific packages for biomedical image and video processing and visualization will be introduced and explored during this module. Students will use videos that they collected during the fly behavior module for practice. Students will also learn how to utilize cutting edge software developed by the Cai lab.

Students will utilize AI software to analyze their fly behavior recordings. They will also learn how to quantify their results.

We’ll visit the North Campus Research Complex (NCRC), home to the Cai lab, for an in-depth tour of our lab’s facilities, including the microscopy suite designed and built specifically for our lab.  Students will also have the opportunity to learn about some of the institutes housed in NCRC.  

Fly behavioral analysis centers around the use of video and machine learning to quantify the posture and interactions of freely moving fruit flies, turning raw motion into objective quantification of behaviors (courtship, chasing, moonwalking, etc.). We use SLEAP (an open-source, deep-learning system for multi-animal pose estimation and tracking) to label keypoints, train AI models, run inference, and interactively perform error corrections. The pose trajectories we output from SLEAP are then used later on for downstream behavior quantification.

Students will perform neural reconstructions using AI tools and data mining, utilizing Flywire and Flylight to form anatomy-based hypotheses. This involves identifying potential inputs and outputs of serotonergic neurons and selecting transgenic fly lines that will label specific neuronal subsets.

We will work with publicly available single-cell RNA sequencing datasets, such as the Fly Cell Atlas, to form hypotheses about the critical neuronal subtypes with unique molecular markers. Using a Python-based environment, students will be exposed to state-of-the-art data science pipelines involving import, pre-processing, statistical tests, and visualization of rich-feature, high-dimensional datasets.