PRINT AND BUILD: The basic setup of the Gilestro-designed, research-grade ethoscope consists primarily of a circuit board, a camera, an infrared LED light strip, and the 3-D–printed housing components. The housing is assembled with regular hardware-store nuts and bolts and the device is powered via a USB cable. Between 1 and 20 flies can be placed in any of eight possible 3-D–printed behavior arenas, which slide into place above the housing’s light box.© GEORGE RETSECK
Understanding how the brain controls behavior is a holy grail for many neuroscientists. Model organisms such as the fruit fly offer a wide array of genetic tools for investigating behavioral questions, but for scientists wishing to do such experiments on a large scale—a discipline called ethomics—there are few technological options.
Drosophila activity monitoring (DAM) systems (from TriKinetics in Massachusetts)—which use one or more infrared light beams to detect the movements of flies in assay chambers—are among the most commonly used ethomic devices. But they lack experimental versatility, and, because the only data they provide are the number of times a fly breaks a light beam, behavioral information is limited.
Systems that use an HD camera mounted above a fly-containing chamber, on the other hand, provide ...
