Used positive control flies (NorpA; UAS Crimson) to check what intensity of light is better for activating the crimson channel and for studying learning behaviour in the joystick experiment.  Tested light in 3 intensity ranges to check what would be best suited.

1. Initially, we were doing experiments at 700 lux intensity. We saw results which possibly point out to damaging of neuronal populations due to such high-intensity light. As can be seen in the graph below, there is a strong aversion in the first 2 minutes of the training period. However, this aversion drastically decreases later and a very strong phenotype is not shown later. This may prove the hypothesis that high-intensity light(about 700 lux) may result in damage to neuronal populations.
2. So we tried with two more light intensities – 400 lux and 100 lux. The graphs for these are attached below. As can be clearly seen that now the results dont just show up for the first training segment but remain til the very end. This indicates that both 100lux and 400 lux light intensity are safe and do not disrupt neurons. Also, it can be clearly seen that there is a stronger and more pronounced effect with 400 lux light intensity. Thus we decide that 400 lux light intensity needs to be used for testing crimson channel expression for the joystick experiment.