High-Resolution Positional Tracking for Long-Term Analysis of Drosophila Sleep and Locomotion Using the “Tracker” Program

By Nathan C. Donelson, E. Z. Kim, Justin B. Slawson, C. Vecsey, R. Huber, Leslie C. Griffith. 2012

191 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Drosophila melanogaster has been used for decades in the study of circadian behavior, and more recently has become a popular model for the study of sleep. The classic method for monitoring fly activity involves counting the number of infrared beam crosses in individual small glass tubes. Incident recording methods such as this can measure gross locomotor activity, but they are unable to provide details about where the fly is located in space and do not detect small movements (i.e. anything less than half the enclosure size), which could lead to an overestimation of sleep and an inaccurate report of the behavior of the fly. This is especially problematic if the fly is awake, but is not moving distances that span the enclosure. Similarly, locomotor deficiencies could be incorrectly classified as sleep phenotypes. To address these issues, we have developed a locomotor tracking technique (the “Tracker” program) that records the exact location of a fly in real time. This allows for the detection of very small movements at any location within the tube. In addition to circadian locomotor activity, we are able to collect other information, such as distance, speed, food proximity, place preference, and multiple additional parameters that relate to sleep structure. Direct comparisons of incident recording and our motion tracking application using wild type and locomotor-deficient (CASK-β null) flies show that the increased temporal resolution in the data from the Tracker program can greatly affect the interpretation of the state of the fly. This is especially evident when a particular condition or genotype has strong effects on the behavior, and can provide a wealth of information previously unavailable to the investigator. The interaction of sleep with other behaviors can also be assessed directly in many cases with this method.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Genetics

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Citations in the corpus

Mushroom body output neurons encode valence and guide memory-based action selection in Drosophila (2014, methodology): “Total 24-hr sleep amounts (daytime plus nighttime sleep) were extracted from the locomotor data as described by (Donelson et al., 2012); sleep was defined as 5 min or more of inactivity (Hendricks et al.”
Sleep facilitates memory by blocking dopamine neuron mediated forgetting (2015, unknown): “CELL 8218 locomotor bout structure) (Donelson et al., 2012) (Figures 1E and S1A).”
A single pair of neurons links sleep to memory consolidation in Drosophila melanogaster (2015, methodology): “Sleep analysis was conducted using an in-house Matlab program described previously (Donelson et al., 2012).”
Short neuropeptide F is a sleep-promoting inhibitory modulator (2013, methodology): “…in addition to the clock neurons. sNPF and other sleep-relevant neuromodulators like DA are likely to act at multiple sites in the brain given the major state (A) Sleep, locomotor activity, and position relative to food were monitored by computer video tracking (Donelson et al., 2012).”
Propagation of homeostatic sleep signals by segregated synaptic microcircuits of the Drosophila mushroom body (2015, unknown): “Sleep Assays Total 24 hr sleep quantity (daytime plus nighttime sleep) was extracted from DAM system locomotor activity data as described [47]: sleep is defined as a contiguous period of inactivity lasting 5 min or more [13, 14].”