In the CUBE discussions some students came up with a challenge to track the movement of fruit flies in their bottles during night time. During night time there is dark and they actually cannot see flies and their movement to know their activity. The students are studying sleep-wake studies in fruit flies and its important to track activity of fruit flies during night in dark. A suggestion came that we can use infrared light as a source to detect fruit fly movements in bottle/test tubes during night time. As during night time we cannot take video/pictures using normal camera, there is need for infrared light source.
As the students are working in Home Labs it is necessary that the design is simple and some simple infrared source can be used to develop a frugal activity monitoring system. What could be the simple infrared source easily available in Home Lab conditions?
I am sharing the design of the âDrosophila Activity Monitoringâ system below which we want to design. Please suggest how it could be possible to fabricate one in Home Lab conditions.
This is the design of the setup of âDrosophila Activity Monitoring Systemâ (DAM System).
(TriKinetics systems use infrared beams to detect and quantify animal movement over time. In a typical experiment, individuals are placed into transparent tubes with a supply of food, and as they move back and forth, their locomotor activity is recorded. Such daily activity records were first used to characterize the circadian rhythm of drosophila, and since then have been used to measure sleep, longevity, social interaction, geotaxis, phototaxis, learning, and drug response in various species of flies, mosquitoes, bees, spiders, ants, moths, cockroaches, wasps, beetles, zooplankton, and fish).