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Measurement of sedation in individual Drosophila
Author(s) -
Clowes Katherine Rose,
Petersen E. Nicholas,
Hansen Scott
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
the faseb journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.709
H-Index - 277
eISSN - 1530-6860
pISSN - 0892-6638
DOI - 10.1096/fasebj.2019.33.1_supplement.802.5
Subject(s) - sedation , drosophila (subgenus) , isoflurane , drosophila melanogaster , anesthetic , anesthesia , medicine , biology , genetics , gene
Though widely used, the mechanisms of sedation from compounds like ethanol and volatile anesthetics are not well understood. Drosophila melanogaster has been identified as an ideal model organism for studying phenotypic responses to ethanol and other anesthetics due to its low cost, similar phenotypic response, and many available genetic tools. Previously, measuring the effects of anesthetics on Drosophila has required labor‐intensive methods often using large cohorts of flies, making them cumbersome and inefficient. Here, we describe the setup and experimental protocol for Volatile Anesthetic Position Recording (VAPR), a high‐throughput technique to measure the effect of ethanol vapor and other volatile drugs on Drosophila behavior. VAPR utilizes flow meters to adjust the relative concentration of aerosolized drugs which are then passed through chambers containing individual flies. Automated video tracking records the position and movement of the flies over time, which we analyze to quantify hyperactivity, sedation, and other treatment related behavioral changes. Using VAPR, we found flies lacking the enzyme phospholipase D (PLD) are insensitive to ethanol sedation but appear unaffected in their sensitivity to the anesthetics chloroform and isoflurane. Support or Funding Information National Science Foundation (NSF) Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) grant 1359369. This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal .