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Navigating Bacterial Changes in Aging Organisms: Graphs, Patterns, and Models

Author(s): Maila Hallare1, Iordanka Panayotova2, Anna Salazar2

1. United States Air Force Academy 2. Christopher Newport University

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Summary:
Aging is an incredibly important area of research, and recent biological advances implicate the intestines in aging pathologies. Given that the gut harbors an immense amount of an organism’s bacteria and these bacteria levels change with age, this…

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Aging is an incredibly important area of research, and recent biological advances implicate the intestines in aging pathologies. Given that the gut harbors an immense amount of an organism’s bacteria and these bacteria levels change with age, this activity will investigate changes in bacterial levels at different time points in an aging organism. Bacterial levels from only two days, 60 and 80 days old, were collected to minimize costs and the sacrifice of the model organism, the fruit fly. Model organisms are used in order to conduct informative biological experiments in an ethical, cost effective, and timely manner. Fruit flies are one of the most common genetic models because of their ease of maintenance, short lifespan, and their genetic similarity to many other organisms, including humans, with fruit flies expressing 75% of human disease-causing genes. It is well known that bacteria grow proportionally to the number present, which means that they obey an exponential growth model, when provided with unlimited nutrients and space. In this activity, students will create graphs and develop equations to visualize and model raw data obtained from aging flies.