Effect of Blue Light on Planarian Sleep

Jan 2019 - May 2019

This was my first science research project and was part of my introductory research class. We all had to choose our own projects, and I decided to come up with this one since I had known about the effects of blue light on sleep, and I thought it could be cool to investigate its effects on planarian, which was one of the only organisms we were allowed to use.

This was definitely a fun project. I had worked with someone in my class named Irene, and each day we would take care of the planarians by feeding them and changing their water. In order to track their movement, or "sleep", I came up with the idea to film them at a time during the night after being subjected to either blue or red light for 30 minutes.

We each built our own separate contraption at home to conduct this project and we even took planarians home with us each week to conduct the experiment!

Afterward, I took the videos we we recorded and ran them through a program called WormLab, which calculated their velocity during the time interval. It was a very time consuming process as I needed to process about 30 examples consisting of 30 minutes of footage each.

We did have a few problems along the way. We actually did a trial of this during the April break; however, all of our planarians happened to die during that break! In addition, we had planned to use a software called "ptracker" to measure the velocity of the planarians at first, but unfortunately, it did not work as expected. So we kind of scrambled at the last minute and found WormLab, which worked very well.

Overall, this was a simple yet fun first project for me. It will always be in my memories, and it was a great first dive into the world of research.