In fact, there are plenty of ways to assess learning in flies. It will depend also on what kind of learning you are looking for, which stage to look at (adults, larvae) or even if you want to look at difference between sex. But, olfactory conditioning is one of the classical way to do it (aversive or positive).

I think that you may find some answer in the publication of Pitman et al. in Fly in 2009: "There are many way to train a fly".

thank you Ariele. I am looking for the article. Can you site me a good model for assessing cognitive functions?

You are welcome!

If you have a hard time to find the article, I could send it to you.

I am not sure what you mean exactly by cognitive functions, it is kind of hard to be accurate when you are talking about cognition and Drosophila.

I think that there starts to be a model of attention deficit with Drosophila, mostly with sleep deprivation. After, it will more in the field of learning and memory.

Do you know what you are looking for? What kind of cognitive function do you want to look at? Then I could maybe be more specific.

But, if you want, you can also look on the Interactive Fly, the website has a lot of behavior paradigm describe. Here is the link:

http://www.sdbonline.org/sites/fly/aimain/6behavior.htm

Edit: I just saw the title of your question. A very simple way to assess learning is to present the flies with an odor paired with an aversive (mated female for male, electric shock,...) or a positive (sugar, ...) stimulus and then test the memory of the flies in a two choice assay (like a Y-maze) with the odor used during the training versus another one.

I hope it helps!

Thank you again Ariele... the link is quite helpful. In fact I was completely unaware that we have this much options. I am looking into it. Coming back to cognition question, I would say I do not want to limit it to Drosophila only. I, in general want to know in what other models we can assay it more pronouncedly and easily for example, decision making. and yes, I got that paper you wrote me about.

Regards.

You are very welcome!

So, I am not sure I am going to be totally able to answer your question, but mostly, you could assess decision making in most animal. For that, you could use a simple two-choice assay, after it depend what kind of decision process you want to study.

The different rodents model (and also non-human primates, but I don't know much about it) are much used to study cognitive function. In general, if you want more complex behaviors, you will used rats instead of mice, but mice provide more genetic tools than rats. In rodents, as the sense of smell is very developed, the olfactory assays are easy to establish and relevant to the animal. You could after render the choice more complex by adding difficulty level to reach certain choice (like maze more and more complex to reach a food source).

After, I think that there are a lot of study done on decision making involving mating partners or pheromones.

In fact, the more complicated stuff is to know exactly what you want to see (decision making for mating behavior, feeding behavior, learning, short-term, long-term, etc.), once your question is clear, it is in general relatively easy to find a way to test a specific behavior.

Ariel, have you ever did any study which compares the olfactory learning of a neurodegenerative model, say mutant Drosophila with controls?

Personally, I never worked on learning. But, I know that olfactory learning is used in Alzheimer's disease model (for example, there is the publication of Beharry et al., in 2013 in Journal of Alzheimer's disease).

The advantages are numerous, most of the brain structures and neurons involved in olfactory learning (of some odors especially) are well described, and there are a lot of tools to manipulate these neurons.

If your behavioral test is relatively simple, it is easy to verify the influence of manipulation compare to control. For example, if you use the UAS/GAL4 system, your experimental flies will have both the GAL4 and the UAS, your controls flies that will have either the GAL4 or the UAS (heterozygote over wild-type) will allow you to check for an effect due to the insertion. You can also compare the results through aging, but the statistical analysis will be a little bit different.

Are you looking for a protocol to assess cognitive impact of neurodegeneration in flies?

Yes, I need protocols for that. The flies genetically have been linked with neurodegenerative preponsity they are showing abrupt circadian behavior. In fact,they are not doing any thing expected.I was wondering what will be their response towards learning stimulus.

I am doing the same analysis with regard to aging. Mainly research articles of T Tully and Davis R are the most cited and useful experimental references. By the way if you are going to assess associative learning in Drosophila you can have a look to my paper which is available in my RG account. Cheers.

Thanks allot Julien, Your answer was of great help in giving an insight to on bench challenges. I hope Ariele will serve as great resource and I am looking at buridan's assay in the mean time.