Walking behavior in a circular arena modified by pulsed light stimulation in Drosophila melanogaster w1118 line
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Computational Biology
- Keywords
- Drosophila melanogaster, animal behavior, Insect, walking, mini-white gene, genetic background, light
- Copyright
- © 2017 Qiu et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Walking behavior in a circular arena modified by pulsed light stimulation in Drosophila melanogaster w1118 line. PeerJ Preprints 5:e2908v3 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2908v3
Abstract
The Drosophila melanogaster white-eyed w1118 line serves as a blank control, allowing genetic recombination of any gene of interest along with a readily recognizable marker. w1118 flies display behavioral susceptibility to environmental stimulation such as light. It is of great importance to characterize the behavioral performance of w1118 flies because this would provide a baseline from which the effect of the gene of interest could be differentiated. Little work has been performed to characterize the walking behavior in adult w1118 flies. Here we show that pulsed light stimulation increased the regularity of walking trajectories of w1118 flies in circular arenas. We statistically modeled the distribution of distances to center and extracted the walking structures of w1118 flies. Pulsed light stimulation redistributed the time proportions for individual walking structures. Specifically, pulsed light stimulation reduced the episodes of crossing over the central region of the arena. An addition of four genomic copies of mini-white, a common marker gene for eye color, mimicked the effect of pulsed light stimulation in reducing crossing in a circular arena. The reducing effect of mini-white was copy-number-dependent. These findings highlight the rhythmic light stimulation-evoked modifications of walking behavior in w1118 flies and an unexpected behavioral consequence of mini-white in transgenic flies carrying w1118 isogenic background.
Author Comment
A major revision has been made to integrate a biological meaning to the statistical analysis. In this new version, we highlight two findings. The first is the behavioral characterization of w1118 adult flies in the circular arenas. The second is that the mini-white, a common eye-color marker, has a behavioral effect.