I'll be starting a Lifespan experiment soon and would like to have the data documented in the best way possible.
I use the Drosophila Activity Monitoring (DAM) system from TriKinetics: (http://www.trikinetics.com/) and (http://www.trikinetics.com/Downloads/DAM2%20Data%20Sheet.pdf).
It basically allows you to record activity of individual flies over long periods in very short intervals (e. g. 1 min).
It consists of a monitor that can be filled with up to 32 tubes. Each of the tubes contains a single fly and is filled up at one side to a third with your food of choice and sealed with a plug or parafilm. The system determines the activity of the animals by counting crosses through a light beam and stores the data from every single fly and time interval in a text file. This file can be analyzed with multiple softwares available (see: http://www.trikinetics.com/). I use ActogramJ, which by the way is a very nice program to visualize single fly activity over weeks.
There are manifold advantages of the system:
- You can determine the time point of decease very precisely (hours or even more precise).
- You do not have to check or count the flies every day (you can literally leave the flies there for several weeks without doing anyting). You just should transfer the flies to new food tubes every second or third week, since wild-type Drosophila easily can survive up to 60 days.
- It does not generate huge amounts of data and does not require as much memory space and effort as a video tracking system would do.
Check also this publication:
http://cshprotocols.cshlp.org/content/2010/11/pdb.prot5518
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Social Science
- Media
- Journalism