Monitoring Behaviour in Sick and Healthy Flies/ (Effects of pesticides on insect behaviour: a behavioural neuroscience approach to pest control resear

Measuring and quantifying behaviour is one of the greatest challenges to modern neuroscience.
Tools are constantly being developed and updated to study behaviour in animals. Neuroscience has the ability to use genetic, chemical or physical methods to change and influence behaviour, and using a variety of tools, there is the potential to track and analyse these changes. Drosophila is a useful model organism to use to study behaviour, due to its manipulative genome and for practical reasons, e.g. large populations can be raised relatively easily and quickly. The most widely used system to track fly behaviour has, up until now, been the Drosophila activity monitor (DAM) (TriKinetics Inc., Waltham, Massachusetts) An infrared beam is passed through the midline of a single tube containing a fly. When the fly crosses the line, the "activity event" is monitored (Pfeiffenberger et al, 2010). Although this system is functional and can give a general measurement of fly locomotion, true activity is only known at the moment the beam is crossed. Information regarding micro-movements, such as grooming or feeding may be characterised falsely as sleep (Donelson et al, 2012).To address these issues and establish a system which can quantify behaviour more accurately, the Gilestro Lab has developed the ethoscope. The set-up of this equipment is similar to a DAM, with individual flies placed in vials. However, this technology enables real-time, high throughput activity recording of Drosophila behaviours other than just locomotion. The device has the ability to monitor micro-behaviours and has the potential to be used for the activity tracking of other animals. The most powerful feature of the ethoscope is the ability to manipulate individual flies in real-time. For example, within sleep deprivation experiments, a motor can be connected to the ethoscope. The ethoscope can detect the duration of immobility of the fly and the motor can rotate the tube to enforce sleep deprivation (Geissmann et al, 2017). The lab has so far used ethoscopes for monitoring sleep deprivation (Beckwith et al, 2017), tracking locomotion, and monitoring decision making.The proposal of this project is to use the ethoscope tracking system to study the behaviour of sick and healthy flies. The technology so far can track three different states of activity; quiescence (correlated to sleep), movement, and micro-behaviours, such as feeding, grooming, spinning and egg-laying.The objective of the project is to develop this technology to be able to accurately identify whether a fly is sick or healthy. Using the ethoscope's video tracking, the aim will be to study specific micro-movements in real-time, with the identification of "disease characteristics" that enable the classification of a fly's state (e.g. sick or healthy) and the severity of symptoms.In collaboration with Syngenta, this technology will be used to analyse the symptoms seen from insect exposure to new pesticides. Once the symptoms have been analysed, the phenotypes can be compared to those of known pesticides to help classification and give insights into the mode of action of the compounds.Using the high-throughput ability of the ethoscope platform will also allow high frequency data collection and using statistical software, statistical data analysis can also be used to describe observed behaviour in a more objective way.If successful, this work could lead to further applications, such as the ability to identify and quantify symptoms in Drosophila disease models, such as that of Parkinson's disease (Whitworth, 2011), Huntington's disease (Krench and Littleton, 2013) or other neurodegenerative diseases. A ethoscope is a flexible tool that can be combined with other hardware and software to enable its modification for studying specific behaviours. This work has the potential to lead to exciting advances in behavioural technology and has the potential to have an even greater impact than that discussed here.