GENERAL CONTROLS

INFOBAR
The tabs at the top of the screen allow you to access the Introduction, the Notebook, Assignments, Genetic Abbreviations, and Help.

Introduction: This provides an overview and links to background information on the lab.

Notebook: Record your own notes on the results of the lab--your hypotheses, details about results, and conclusions. You can also move data from the Results pages directly to the Notebook - see Exporting.

Assignments: Doing the assignments is critical to understanding the concepts of this lab. The Assignments here were written to benefit a wide range of general biology classes and you should find them helpful, but check with your instructor before proceeding with any Assignments.

Genetic Abbreviations: FlyLab uses a different convention for labeling mutations. This screen shows you a chart of those labels.

Glossary: The glossary contains definitions for selected terms in the lab.

Help: Brings you to this screen.

MAIN SCREEN

Offspring Popup Menu: Scroll down the menu in this window to choose the average number of offspring you want to produce in your mating: 100, 1000, or 10,000. The actual number will vary around this average due to simulated "experimental error."

Design Flies: Clicking the design box under either fly takes you to the design screen (see details below).

Mate: When you have finished designing or selecting both of your flies, click Mate. Images of the new offspring will appear in the bottom view.

Select: This button appears below the image of offspring flies. Clicking this button selects a single offspring of the displayed phenotype for mating. The offspring image will be copied to the top of the screen.
Remove: This button appears below the image of parent flies. Clicking this button allows you to remove the parent fly so you can replace it by designing another fly or selecting an offspring.

INPUT CONTROLS

DESIGN SCREEN
Design both your female and/or male fly by clicking on the Design box under each fly and choosing genetic characteristics (mutations) from each Category: Bristle, Body Color, Antennae, Eye Color, Eye Shape, Wing Size, Wing Shape, Wing Vein, Wing Angle. You can select only one characteristic from each category. When you have selected a characteristic, a male or female symbol will appear in the category button on the left-hand side after you have selected it.

Once you have started an experiment and designed a fly with one or more mutations, the options available to you for the chosen traits will be limited to Wild Type and the one mutation that you have already used. For example, if you design a female with curly wings and select the fly for mating, then the wing shape options available for the male are limited to wild type and curly wings. The options of the other traits will be unaffected. All options become available again after you click on the New Mate button.

Wild Type: This is the default value in each category. "Wild Type" represents the normal phenotype found in the "wild."
When you have finished selecting all your desired characteristics, click on the Select button and your newly designed fly will appear on the mating screen.
Reset All:Click this button to change all previously chosen characteristics back to wild type.
New Mate:Use this to start a new mating where you design both parent flies.

DATA/RESULTS
Analyze Results: This button appears on the left side of the screen after each mate. Click it to get the following screens:

Summary of Results: This lists the Parents followed by a table of offspring: the phenotype, number, proportion, and ratio. This Summary can be added to the Lab Notebook by clicking Add Data to Notebook. The Results initially appear broken down by sex and phenotype.

At the top of the screen, you can choose Ignore Sex to remove this sex as part of the categorization, and Use Sex to add it back in.

Chi-Square Analysis: Allows you to enter a hypothesis to explain the data and perform a chi-square statistical analysis of your hypothesis. The chi-square analysis computes hypothetical numbers (expected) based on your ratios and tests to see if these values differ significantly from the observed numbers. Enter your hypothetical values for the relative frequencies of the phenotypes into the text fields in the hypothesis column. Your values can be entered as integer numbers representing ratios (e.g. 4 and 1), integer numbers representing percentages (e.g. 80 and 20), or decimal numbers representing proportions or probabilities (e.g. 0.80 and 0.20). Once you have entered a value into each field, click Test Hypothesis at the bottom of the screen. You will see a box providing the results of a chi-square statistical test of your hypothesis: a table of phenotypes, observed numbers, expected numbers based on your hypothesis, and the chi-square terms. The sum of this last column is your chi-square test statistic. The Level of Significance represents the probability that deviations of the observed data from your hypothesis are due to random chance.

At the top of the screen, you can choose Ignore Sex to remove this sex as part of the categorization, and Use Sex to add it back in.

Exporting: Data can be exported (copied) from the Lab Notes to a standard HTML page. From here you can use the web browser menu to print your results or save them to disk.

Add Data to Notebook: Click to copy data on a results page to the Notebook.

Return to Lab: Once you are done viewing or exporting results data, choose this to go back to the lab screen.