Prandiology of Drosophila and the CAFE assay (original) (raw)
Related papers
Molecular brain, 2015
Food intake of the adult fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, an intermittent feeder, is attributed to several behavioral elements including foraging, feeding initiation and termination, and food ingestion. Despite the development of various feeding assays in fruit flies, how each of these behavioral elements, particularly food ingestion, is regulated remains largely uncharacterized. To this end, we have developed a manual feeding (MAFE) assay that specifically measures food ingestion of an individual fly completely independent of the other behavioral elements. This assay reliably recapitulates the effects of known feeding modulators, and offers temporal resolution in the scale of seconds. Using this assay, we find that fruit flies can rapidly assess the nutritional value of sugars within 20-30 s, and increase the ingestion of nutritive sugars after prolonged periods of starvation. Two candidate nutrient sensors, SLC5A11 and Gr43a, are required for discriminating the nutritive sugars,...
Quantification of Food Intake in Drosophila
PLOS ONE, 2009
Measurement of food intake in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is often necessary for studies of behaviour, nutrition and drug administration. There is no reliable and agreed method for measuring food intake of flies in undisturbed, steady state, and normal culture conditions. We report such a method, based on measurement of feeding frequency by proboscisextension, validated by short-term measurements of food dye intake. We used the method to demonstrate that (a) female flies feed more frequently than males, (b) flies feed more often when housed in larger groups and (c) fly feeding varies at different times of the day. We also show that alterations in food intake are not induced by dietary restriction or by a null mutation of the fly insulin receptor substrate chico. In contrast, mutation of takeout increases food intake by increasing feeding frequency while mutation of ovo D increases food intake by increasing the volume of food consumed per proboscisextension. This approach provides a practical and reliable method for quantification of food intake in Drosophila under normal, undisturbed culture conditions.
Automated monitoring and quantitative analysis of feeding behaviour in Drosophila
Nature Communications, 2014
Food ingestion is one of the defining behaviours of all animals, but its quantification and analysis remain challenging. This is especially the case for feeding behaviour in small, genetically tractable animals such as Drosophila melanogaster. Here, we present a method based on capacitive measurements, which allows the detailed, automated and highthroughput quantification of feeding behaviour. Using this method, we were able to measure the volume ingested in single sips of an individual, and monitor the absorption of food with high temporal resolution. We demonstrate that flies ingest food by rhythmically extending their proboscis with a frequency that is not modulated by the internal state of the animal. Instead, hunger and satiety homeostatically modulate the microstructure of feeding. These results highlight similarities of food intake regulation between insects, rodents, and humans, pointing to a common strategy in how the nervous systems of different animals control food intake.
FLIC: High-Throughput, Continuous Analysis of Feeding Behaviors in Drosophila
We present a complete hardware and software system for collecting and quantifying continuous measures of feeding behaviors in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. The FLIC (Fly Liquid-Food Interaction Counter) detects analog electronic signals as brief as 50 ms that occur when a fly makes physical contact with liquid food. Signal characteristics effectively distinguish between different types of behaviors, such as feeding and tasting events. The FLIC system performs as well or better than popular methods for simple assays, and it provides an unprecedented opportunity to study novel components of feeding behavior, such as time-dependent changes in food preference and individual levels of motivation and hunger. Furthermore, FLIC experiments can persist indefinitely without disturbance, and we highlight this ability by establishing a detailed picture of circadian feeding behaviors in the fly. We believe that the FLIC system will work hand-in-hand with modern molecular techniques to facilitate mechanistic studies of feeding behaviors in Drosophila using modern, highthroughput technologies.
Direct Intake Estimation and Longitudinal Tracking of Solid-food Consumption (DIETS) inDrosophila
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory), 2023
In Drosophila, an organism much used for dietary studies, comprehending the regulation of feeding and the effect of diet requires accurate measurement of food intake. Although flies are normally housed on agar-based foods, direct estimation of solid feeding has been thought infeasible due to the minute amounts they consume. Moreover, it has been technically challenging to precisely restrict the amount of food flies consume during an experiment. Here, we report a label-free, sensitive, and precise assay, DIETS (Direct Intake Estimation and Tracking of Solid food consumption), that is compatible with videography. In DIETS, food consumed by a group of flies, from a small cup is directly weighed over hours to days. Dietary choice is measured in the assay by weighing food intake from two cups with distinct diets. DIETS enables the quantification of a high-fat diet intake over days. Notably, by limiting food in the cups, we could precisely implement targeted dietary restrictions in flies without diluting nutrients or causing compensatory feeding.
Automatic High Throughput Measurement of Feeding Behavior in Drosophila
2014
A comparison of the ethograms generated by manual annotation with the results of our automated method confirmed the accuracy of our approach. The number of “sips” detected by our algorithm was strongly and significantly correlated with the number of proboscis contacts with the food (Rho=0.874, p<<0.0001). The algorithm detected 92.5% of the sips tabulated via manual scoring, while missing 7.5% and generating 7.5% false sips. We have found that feeding from a non-liquid food induces a pattern of highly stereotyped rhythmic proboscis extensions and retractions that is suggestive of an underlying central pattern generator controlling the feeding motor program. By adapting the luciferase bioluminescent techniques to measure the intake in single flies we measured that 1 "sip" detected by the flyPAD corresponds on average to an intake of 1 nl of food. The analysis of ingestion dynamics and the microstructure of meals allowed us to dissect the behavioral elements mediating ...
Compensatory ingestion upon dietary restriction in Drosophila melanogaster
Nature Methods, 2005
Dietary restriction extends the lifespan of numerous, evolutionarily diverse species 1 . In D. melanogaster, a prominent model for research on the interaction between nutrition and longevity, dietary restriction is typically based on medium dilution, with possible compensatory ingestion commonly being neglected. Possible problems with this approach are revealed by using a method for direct monitoring of D. melanogaster feeding behavior. This demonstrates that dietary restriction elicits robust compensatory changes in food consumption. As a result, the effect of medium dilution is overestimated and, in certain cases, even fully compensated for. Our results strongly indicate that feeding behavior and nutritional composition act concertedly to determine fly lifespan. Feeding behavior thus emerges as a central element in D. melanogaster aging.
Feeding regulation in Drosophila
Current opinion in neurobiology, 2014
Neuromodulators play a key role in adjusting animal behavior based on environmental cues and internal needs. Here, we review the regulation of Drosophila feeding behavior to illustrate how neuromodulators achieve behavioral plasticity. Recent studies have made rapid progress in determining molecular and cellular mechanisms that translate the metabolic needs of the fly into changes in neuroendocrine and neuromodulatory states. These neuromodulators in turn promote or inhibit discrete feeding behavioral subprograms. This review highlights the links between physiological needs, neuromodulatory states, and feeding decisions.
International Journal of Advanced Research (IJAR), 2018
Gustatory assay and nutritional constituents is an important factor determning the feeding behaviour of an organism. In this review, feeedingbehaviour in Drosophila melanogasterpre-adult (larvae) was investigated and the results were compared with those forpost- adult (flies) stages, supplementing Drosophila with varientdietsnamely yeasts and fruits. It was obserevd that pre-adult preferred yeast supplemented diets rather than control and fruits, while the post adult showed preference choice for fruits than yeast and control. Thus,higher nutritional value of fruit and yeast with control is expected to favor sensory and physiological adaptations for feeding behaviour,showing gustatory receptors act cooperatively in larval and adult taste sensing in every stages of development having different degree of responsiveness to varient diet supplemented.
Journal of insect physiology, 2017
We introduce a high-resolution adult foraging assay (AFA) that relates pre- and post-ingestive walking behavior to individual instances of food consumption. We explore the utility of the AFA by taking advantage of established rover and sitter strains known to differ in a number of feeding-related traits. The AFA allows us to effectively distinguish locomotor behavior in Fed and Food-Deprived (FD) rover and sitter foragers. We found that rovers exhibit more exploratory behavior into the center of an arena containing sucrose drops compared to sitters who hug the edges of the arena and exhibit thigmotaxic behavior. Rovers also discover and ingest more sucrose drops than sitters. Sitters become more exploratory with increasing durations of food deprivation and the number of ingestion events also increases progressively with prolonged fasting for both strains. AFA results are matched by strain differences in sucrose responsiveness, starvation resistance, and lipid levels, suggesting that...