DICKINSON, M. H.; Caltech: Adventures in Fly World, or, Building a Better Bottle

Drosophila melanogaster has long been an essential model system in the fields of Cell Biology and Development. Many of the presentations in this symposium testify to the increasing use of Drosophila to address organismal questions, such as the influence of alcohol on physiology and behavior. The exploitation of Drosophila as a model for systems-level biology is limited more by available phenotypic assays than by the current pool of genetic techniques. In order to exploit the full potential of Drosophila in comparative and organismal biology, researchers must have access to quick and efficient screens of behavior and physiology that permit the analysis of thousands of individuals. For these reasons, my laboratory has been developing a turn-key analysis system for the study of behavior called FlyWorld – a modular system of software and hardware capable of reliably tracking and controlling the motion of flies within controlled sensory environments. FlyWorld attempts to recreate many of the salient challenges faced by flies in the natural world under laboratory conditions. The goal is to develop a flexible instrumentation kit that could be configured like LEGOtm by individual researchers into a variety of configurations for different behavioral or physiological assays. We have been using a preliminary version of FlyWorld to study the role of alcohol and other factors in the phenomenon of recourse abandonment. The lifespan of a fly can far exceed the time a single piece of fruit remains a viable resource. Although much research has focused on how flies find new resources, little is known about how they abandon fruit when it is no longer viable for either themselves or their offspring. Through the automation permitted using FlyWorld, we are beginning to study the neurobiological mechanisms that underlie this critical behavioral choice.