Abstract
Fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) are a widely studied model species for addressing basic and applied biological questions, including the obesity epidemic (Hardy, Physiology and genetics of starvation-selected \( \hbar \). Las Vegas: Digital Scholarship@UNLV, 2016). Biologists investigate the effects of obesity through studying the physiology and behavior of normal and obese flies in response to exercise, diet, and other experimental conditions. In this paper, we propose an instrument, called “Fly Roller”, for exercising flies in biological experiments with or without measurement of metabolic rate. Fly Roller comprises two parts: a roller mechanism and a controller circuit. The roller mechanism supports and slowly rotates a plastic tube containing fruit flies, which reflexively walk along the inner wall of the tube. When metabolic measurements are desired, a gas analyzer can be coupled to a modified tube design with air valves at the ends of the tube, allowing the air lines to remain stationary in low-friction bearings while the tube containing the flies is rotated.
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Acknowledgements
We want to specially thank Clinton Barnes for lending his expertise and time to design and build the first iterations of the mechanical rollers as well as allowing us to work with some of his workshop equipment at a local high school. We also want to thank Tom McCarroll, one of the lab equipment managers at the ECE department at UNLV, for helping us by providing some of the parts for the control circuit. We also could not have completed this work without the funding support provided by UNLV Faculty Opportunity Award titled Obese Fruit Flies as a Model for Exercise: Construction and Validation of a Drosophila Tread Mill and Exercise Metabolism System.
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Dizon, R. et al. (2020). Fly Roller: Development of an Instrument to Exercise Fruit Flies. In: Latifi, S. (eds) 17th International Conference on Information Technology–New Generations (ITNG 2020). Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1134. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43020-7_59
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43020-7_59
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