Quantifying and predicting Drosophila larvae crawling phenotypes

• Published in: Scientific reports 2016-06, Vol.6 (1), p.27972-27972, Article 27972
• Main Authors: Günther, Maximilian N., Nettesheim, Guilherme, Shubeita, George T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 631/1647/334/1582/715; 631/378; 639/766/747; Alzheimer Disease - pathology; Alzheimer's disease; Animals; Biometry - methods; Brownian motion; Disease Models, Animal; Drosophila melanogaster - physiology; Drug Evaluation, Preclinical - methods; Entomology - methods; Experiments; Foraging behavior; Fragile X Syndrome - pathology; Genetic Testing - methods; Humanities and Social Sciences; Insects; Larva - physiology; Larvae; Locomotion; multidisciplinary; Phenotype; Science
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/srep27972

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is a widely used model for cell biology, development, disease, and neuroscience. The fly’s power as a genetic model for disease and neuroscience can be augmented by a quantitative description of its behavior. Here we show that we can accurately account for the complex and unique crawling patterns exhibited by individual Drosophila larvae using a small set of four parameters obtained from the trajectories of a few crawling larvae. The values of these parameters change for larvae from different genetic mutants, as we demonstrate for fly models of Alzheimer’s disease and the Fragile X syndrome, allowing applications such as genetic or drug screens. Using the quantitative model of larval crawling developed here we use the mutant-specific parameters to robustly simulate larval crawling, which allows estimating the feasibility of laborious experimental assays and aids in their design.