Murphy Keith R, Park Jin Hong, Huber Robert, Ja William W
Department of Neuroscience, The Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, Florida, USA.
Center on Aging, The Scripps Research Institute, Jupiter, Florida, USA.
Nat Protoc. 2017 Nov;12(11):2355-2366. doi: 10.1038/nprot.2017.096. Epub 2017 Oct 12.
Drosophila is widely used for the dissection of genetic and neuronal mechanisms of behavior. Recently, flies have emerged as a model for investigating the regulation of feeding and sleep. Although typically studied in isolation, increasing evidence points to a fundamental connection between these behaviors. Thus, a system for measuring sleep and feeding simultaneously in a single integrated system is important for interpreting behavioral shifts of either state. Here, we describe the construction and use of the Activity Recording Capillary Feeder or CAFE (ARC), a machine-vision (automated image tracking)-based system for the integrated measurement of sleep and feeding in individual Drosophila. Flies feed on liquid food from a microcapillary, and consumption is measured by tracking the liquid meniscus over time. Sleep measurements are obtained from positional tracking of individual animals, and arousal threshold can be determined by vibrational stimulus response. Using this system, a single computer and experimenter can track diverse behaviors from up to 60 individual flies in a single integrated system. The ARC is efficiently assembled with minimal training, and each experiment can be run for up to ∼7 d, with a total setup and breakdown time of ∼2 h.
果蝇被广泛用于剖析行为的遗传和神经机制。最近，果蝇已成为研究进食和睡眠调节的模型。尽管通常是单独研究，但越来越多的证据表明这些行为之间存在着根本联系。因此，在一个单一的集成系统中同时测量睡眠和进食的系统对于解释任何一种状态下的行为变化都很重要。在这里，我们描述了活动记录毛细管饲养器（CAFE，即ARC）的构建和使用，这是一种基于机器视觉（自动图像跟踪）的系统，用于在单个果蝇中综合测量睡眠和进食。果蝇从微毛细管中摄取液体食物，并通过随时间跟踪液体弯月面来测量食物消耗。睡眠测量是通过对单个动物的位置跟踪获得的，觉醒阈值可以通过振动刺激反应来确定。使用这个系统，一台计算机和一名实验人员可以在一个单一的集成系统中跟踪多达60只果蝇的各种行为。ARC组装高效，只需极少的培训，每个实验最多可运行约7天，总设置和拆卸时间约为2小时。
