Ca. 1 month ago we started suddenly having electrostatic problems with handling our Drosophila flies. During standard egg-laying cage protocol, when flies are anesthetized with CO2 and transferred to an egg cage with grape agar, our flies awake totally normal, they act normal, fly and climb for ca. 10 minutes and then start falling down, make circular flying moves on the bottom and in 15-20 minutes all healthy, young flies are lying on the bottom of the egg cage. We have tried the anti-static brush and the ion gun. No results.
Puzzling is that in the past this protocol worked just fine. We've tried to transfer flies without CO2, and we observe the same result, but a little bit slower. If we move the flies to the stock bottle with food, almost all of them recover within and hour.
Anyone have observed an alike phenomenon? Any advices how we have fight the statics?
There are anti static hand tools (guns?) that are used in TEM thin sectioning To relax the sections. Very effective. They are cheep and may work in this application.
Thank you, everyone, for your answer!
Chinaza Godswill Awuchi , I am failing to see how his article can help, sorry. Perhaps the link is wrong? The article is dealing with odour sensing in Drosophila, but does not handle any problems of electrostatics.
Var St. Jeor I have tried antistatic ionic gun, antistatic carbon brush and by now also have antistatic mat for working with electrical parts. Nothings seems to help.
Our next step is to increase air humidity in the lab. Hope that can help.
For those, who are following this question. We have found a cause of this problem and behind it lies a possible solution. The key was an extremely low air humidity in the lab. I am talking about below 20%.
If you are encountering an odd behaviour of flies, while being trasnferred or anesthetized, like sticking together or being unable to fly or properly stand after lab handling, please check the air humidity in your lab.
Dry air can be fought with air conditioning, climatazing entire room or with portative air humidifier, if you do not aim for sterile conditions.
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