Abstract
Motor control requires the central nervous system to integrate different sensory inputs and convey this information to the relevant central pattern generator for execution of motor function through motor neurons and muscles. Proper motor control is essential for any mobile organism to survive and interact with the external environment. For flying insects, motor control is required for flying, walking, feeding and mating apart from other more advanced behaviours such as grooming and aggression. Any perturbation to the sensory input or malfunctioning of neural connections to the motor output can result in motor defects. Here, we describe simple protocols for assessing flight and climbing ability of fruit flies, which can be used as two general tests to assess their motor function.
Keywords: Tethers, Air-puff, Cold anaesthesia, Cylinder
Background
Coordinated motor functions are important for every mobile organism for survival as the major needs of finding food, shelter, mates and escaping from predators involve motor activity. Here we describe protocols to assess the flight and climbing ability of both individual and groups of Drosophila melanogaster. Both these protocols have been used extensively in earlier studies (Agrawal and Hasan, 2015; Pathak et al., 2015; Richhariya et al., 2017).
Part I: Flight protocol
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Software
Procedure
Notes:
Data analysis
Flight durations for 30 Canton S (wild type) flies monitored for 15 min (900 sec) are given in Table 1 and a representative box plot of these data is depicted in Figure 2. Table 1. Flight durations of 30 Canton S–4 days old (wild type) flies of either sex Figure 2. Flight durations of Canton S (wild type) flies depicted as a box plot. The filled square represents mean of the distribution, the box represents 25-75% of the distribution and open diamonds represent flight durations of individual flies.
Part II: Climbing protocol
Notes
The diameter of the cylinder used for climbing assay should not be more than 2.5 cm as higher diameter columns also allow the flies to fly and jump during the assay.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Santanu Banerjee, Sufia Sadaf and Tarjani Agrawal for setting up and improvising the flight protocol to the current format. We would also like to thank NCBS, TIFR for funding. This is a modified version of protocol explained in Agrawal and Hasan, 2015, Pathak et al., 2015 and Richhariya et al., 2017. The authors declare no competing financial interest.
References
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