Abstract
Dr. Kimberly Mulligan of the Department of Biological Sciences recently showed that a modifying genes in fruit flies that are correlated with Autism Spectrum Disorder in humans not only caused neurological changes in the fruit flies, but also structural and microbial changes in their guts. Dr. Eliza Morris and Dr. Mikkel Jensen of the CSUS Astronomy and Physics Department have set out to establish an instrument to quantify the tensile strength of the Drosophila gut. I worked to help establish this instrument by creating a LabVIEW program that can run the instrument. It uses a NIDAQ USB-6212 to interface with a High-Speed Length controller and a Force Transducer which were both sourced from Aurora Scientific. I was successful in writing the LabVIEW program that can drive the contOther rol arm of the High-Speed Length controller, while simultaneously reading the stress on the sample from the Force Transducer. The goal is now to test the instrument with some materials that will have similar stress-strain properties to the fruit fly gut, before testing actual samples from the genetically modified fruit flies with a few standard rheological testing protocols. Namely, a velocity-controlled strain-ramp test, a sinusoidal strain test, and a creep test.