Courtship abnormalities in Drosophila melanogaster

Courtship index (CI) is the percentage of time in which a male fly shows one of six stages in courtship. Normal CI values for wild-type Canton-S (CS) flies are typically around 80%. The aim of this thesis is to see if flies that have inhibitory insertions for various neural functions and abilities, will show abnormalities in CI compared to the results of normal naive CS flies. The inhibitory insertions in these flies means that each mutant stock expresses dsRNA (double stranded RNA) for RNAi of the certain gene that is targeted in the courtship circuit. Thus, the process of RNAi is suppressing the levels of those particular genes. In this experiment, par-6 and rut mutant flies exhibit a decreasing trend in courtship index levels compared to normal naive CS male flies. Gαs, dunce, and TBPH mutant flies show no difference in CI values compared to those of naive CS male flies. These results show that Gαs, dunce, and TBPH RNAi mutant flies demonstrated normal courtship circuit behavior. par-6 and rut RNAi mutant flies show a decreasing trend in CI that shows the courtship circuit is still functioning in its normal fashion