Terror 27 Folic acid effect

https://www.google.com/search?q=dore+illustrations+for+raven&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjbz_apjZTaAhUPM6wKHZSwBaoQ_AUICigB&biw=1260&bih=641#imgrc=9yXhz_7MjO5lyM: downloaded 3/30/18
It is the 24th of April, 2018.
Having found the weight of evidence to suggest that methylation drives fertility in fruit flies, we must conclude that the statement, “Only kinship determines fertility, minus rare disaster,” is incomplete.  One must add, “And methylation has an effect.” 
Pursuing the issue further, I wondered if the entire cocktail used in the previous experiment was actually needed.  Would folic acid alone have an effect?  In the earlier study, it cocktail seemed to have a significant effect over an entire order of magnitude of dilutions.  Doing the same study with only folic acid would have taken years.
But in fact there is only one concentration of folic acid that is of the greatest importance.  Women who are pregnant or liable to become pregnant are advised to take folic acid regularly.  Received wisdom is that since folic acid is water soluble, it does not accumulate in the body so large doses are given with impunity.  Now folic acid is not itself a natural food, but is though to substitute for “folate” compounds, three micrograms of folic acid being the equivalent of five micrograms of folate.  That dose of folate is about what is found in an apple, if eaten seeds and all.  So three micrograms of folic acid, or one ripe apple daily, should be a pretty good amount even if the rest of the diet is lacking.
“Should be” is not “is,” and what I am about to say must not be taken as advice but as an inducement to further study.
Folate is a necessary vitamin.  Its lack can lead to a lethal anemia, since it is necessary for DNA replication, which is necessary for cell division.  Moreover, a lack of folic acid is correlated with a condition called a neural tube defect in a developing pregnancy.  The condition can range in severity from an almost trivial sinus tract in the small of the back to a devastating neurological malformation.  The condition can be prevented by folate about half the time. 
So current practice is to give a woman hundreds of micrograms of folic acid a day.  Please do not eat a hundred apples a day seeds and all; that would include enough cyanide to kill you even though cyanide is nicely soluble in water. 
So the pressing question is whether the current recommended dose of folic acid is safe.

Previously I had no idea what dose of the cocktail had an effect, and it took years to look at a range of values.  But now I could focus on a single dose of a single chemical.
As best as I could, I prepared two feeding formulae for the flies.  One was the standard recommended by the supplier.  The other was mixed not in straight water, but in water that had been given folic acid.  The amount was chosen such that the final food would have the same amount of folic acid per calorie as a woman eating a good 1,800 calorie diet, supplements and all would get. 
I’ll not give you the actual number of folic acid pills I used.  Figure it out for yourself if you choose to run the experiment, which I most urgently beg you to.  The routine was to add four males and four females to a vial and follow them for two weeks.  After about 11 or 12 days fresh flies would begin to emerge.  As soon as they did, I would shake them out into a vial to be kept giving them normal food.  There were three control vials and three fortified.
At the end of two weeks, all the flies that had emerged from all the control vials and all that had emerged from the treated vials were added together and are reported below.  I must mention that shaking the vials out requires a bit of a light touch.  Shake too little and most of the flies remain in their vial.  Shake too hard and the food may drop out as well, drowning a lot of the flies and wrecking the experiment.  Good luck.  I ran the flies, all six vials, in the control medium for a couple generations and then started adding the spiked water to half of them.  This is what I got.

Caption:  The horizontal axis is five successive generations of flies.  The vertical axis it the sum of daily counts as described in the text.
It seems to me that the folic acid reduces fertility.  In terms of the computer program it is increasing the rate at which sites that affect pre- and/or post-zygotic fertility change with a resulting difference between critical areas on chromosomes and thus reducing the number of offspring.
Please, somebody with a better hand, better resources and access to peers give this a try.  Failing that, any youth could do it as a high school science project.  You don’t really need a dissecting microscope.  There are cheaper ways to magnify the flies and be sure of the sex. 

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