How deeply does your mutant sleep? Probing arousal to better understand sleep defects in Drosophila.

ABSTRACT: The fruitfly, Drosophila melanogaster, has become a critical model system for investigating sleep functions. Most studies use duration of inactivity to measure sleep. However, a defining criterion for sleep is decreased behavioral responsiveness to stimuli. Here we introduce the Drosophila ARousal Tracking system (DART), an integrated platform for efficiently tracking and probing arousal levels in animals. This video-based platform delivers positional and locomotion data, behavioral responsiveness to stimuli, sleep intensity measures, and homeostatic regulation effects - all in one combined system. We show how insight into dynamically changing arousal thresholds is crucial for any sleep study in flies. We first find that arousal probing uncovers different sleep intensity profiles among rel

SUBMITTER: Faville R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4326961 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature