Dissection to get physiological insights

These last days led me to a lot of training in insect dissection. My ogt kd phenotypes made me hypothesise that animals are dying due to disbalances in osmoregulation. The way to prove it? experiment and see if the organ has an increase in water secretion!

In insects, the malpighian tubules are the organs responsible for osmoregulation and excretion, and my goal is to remove them from the organism (in this case, Tribolium, the very tiny red flour beetle), and measure how much liquid they are secreting over a specific period of time.

I am very familiar with the anatomy and dissection of insects, but making this assay works has been really challenging! I hope to figure it out and solve this problem over the next weeks. Meanwhile, here are nice images that I took directly from my phone at the scope of some Tribolium organs.

Tribolium cord nerve, together with the brain, acts as a central processing unit for sensory information and motor commands.

Here, you see the insect's gut, that stills connected in its head. Also, the malpighian tubules (those thread-like tubes) are still connected in the common trunk of the gut.