Daniela Diaz '21

Major: Natural Science
Bio: Daniela Diaz grew up in Queens, NY. She is currently a junior at Fordham studying natural science on the pre-health track. She hopes to attend medical school in the near future.

Title of Research: Expression Analysis of Drosophila Fried/HEATR2 in fried-V5 Transgenic Lines
Partner: Dionna Littleton
Mentors: Dr. Jason Morris
Abstract: Drosophila fried mutants exhibit phenotypes such as precocious wandering, larval arrest, melanization of the trachea, and early death. It has previously been shown that Drosophila melanogaster fried alleles disrupt CG31320, which encodes HEATR2, a HEAT Repeat protein required for cilium assembly (Diggle et al., 2014). The Morris Lab used CRISPR-Cas9 and a donor template to insert the codons for a V5 tag into the endogenous fried gene. Using Western Blots and immunohistochemistry techniques, the goal of our project was to determine the expression of Fried/HEATR2 using commercially available antibodies to detect  fried-V5 in the transgenic lines of Drosophila mutant larvae.