What if certain foods could block cancer? Andrew McRandal spent his summer trying to answer that question, using tiny fruit flies as guinea pigs
The sophomore University of Pittsburgh at Bradford pre-medicine student from Pittsburgh learned that this was a complex process. It involved the precise timing of fly fertility, administration of carbon dioxide and deftly tapping on a beaker of fruit flies, a trick that should make them all fall to the bottom for easy separation.
McRandal is conducting research overseen by Dr. Lauren Yaich, associate professor of biology. Yaich has long worked with fruit flies because they are inexpensive and produce a new generation every 10 days.
Her newest research involves a promising hypothesis that compounds found in plants may be able to reduce cancer risk. Food derivatives such as wheat germ and rice bran oil are full of phytosterols currently used to lower cholesterol in humans, she explained.
“Because a lot of people think phytosterols could also lower cancer risk, we thought it would be interesting to look at,” she said.
She returned to her knowledge of fruit flies to design an experiment that could be performed by a student researcher. The first step was to breed flies that would develop cancer without intervention.
McRandal gave each fly a score based on whether it had developed a tumor and what size it was, scoring about 200 fruit flies in an hour.
“It can be therapeutic,” McRandal said about the meditation-like mindset needed to score hundreds of fruit flies.
“I love the research,” he said, adding that he has been helping with lab work in the chemistry department as well as a student worker.
McRandal said that while he learns a lot from reading, the research helps him make better sense of what he is reading.
Currently, he is reading a lot. Having just collected results, he will synthesize his results with background information from other scientists into a paper that he hopes to present at several undergraduate research conferences this year. He has not yet formed definite conclusions for the research.
“What is the most rewarding part of research is when you collect the results,” McRandal said.
Yaich agreed. “Sometimes, you’re the only person in the world who knows what you’ve found out – until you share it.”