TECHNOLOGIES AND RESOURCES

Our detailed protocols are available on protocols.io, our code is on github.

We developed the optoPAD system to investigate the appetitive and aversive effects on feeding by activating or inhibiting gustatory neurons in closed-loop – effectively creating virtual taste realities. The system is flexible and reliable and allows the user to change the dynamics and probability of stimulation in single flies and measure the impact on feeding behavior quantitatively in high throughput.

We make the optoPAD software as well as hardware blueprints freely available on GitHub: Software & Hardware. You can read the paper here.

We have developed the flyPAD (fly Proboscis and Activity Detector) to monitor the feeding behavior of individual Drosophila in an automated and high resolution fashion. The method relies on capacitance measurement of the interaction of the fly with the food (similar to your everyday touch screen) and is easily scalable.

You can find more information, including the building plans on http://flypad.pt/ or in our paper.

A key tool for our studies on the impact of nutrients on the behavior of the animal is a fully chemically defined diet (holidic diet) which allows us to manipulate every nutrient in the diet of the fly at will.

You can find more information in our original paper describing the holidic diet, our newest paper describing an optimized exon matched diet, and you can find detailed protocols in protocols.io

We have published all the tracking data used in our latest paper on feeding decisions in flies.

You can download all the data here.