I’ve started rescreening Christian’s most consistent dopaminergic lines with the positive controls at the joystick machine, to see if everything works. These flies express the optogenetic channel Chrimson in Gr28bd and TrpA1 heat sensitive neurons, so they should use the joystick to switch the light off.

I tested three rounds of three flies each and I got the impression that it worked while I was looking at the flies. The data didn’t look that great, however:

Setting up the experiments, I noticed that the middle setup didn’t really focus the light on the head of the fly very well. This shows in the raw performance index data:

The two middle flies (row #2 and #8) have positive preferences, but never avoid the light, while nearly all other flies do avoid the light to various extents, even if they start out with a positive preference. So I deleted these two flies to see how the data would look then:

I decided that this should be good enough. I improved the middle setup to focus the light better on the fly’s head. Hopefully it will improve the PIs of the flies placed there now.

The results again replicate the ones I had before.. FoxP flies where the temperature switch has been done for 12hrs during embyo stage can barely walk and surely can not fly.

Mean or median?

A highly hypothetical scenario of how the distribution of dwelling times could be. Even if unrealistic, it still illustrates the problem of using median instead of mean.

Plotting the dwelling times as means

Grouped analysis of dwelling times

Cumming estimation plot

Potential Gal4-lines matching parts of the FoxP expression.

I started looking at the FoxP expression pattern from Ottavia to see if i can identify the neurons.

1. PCB and ato crossed to GFP-RFP
2. I crossed the tub-Gal80 again and I will temperature-induce in adulthood, then I will test at 5 days old, to see if I have any difference if compared to the ones tested at 3 days old
3. Did the tub-Gal80 again with the induction during embryo, for andy to test together with his one
4. Wrote almost all of the captions for the figures (exception made for the ones I need to finish experiments)
5. Writing the results, I think I can manage to finish them for next monday.

The old platform works a lot more consistently compared to the new one. Unless major improvements are seen I do not see any reason to update it.

• Added a timer
• Previous version generated faulty xml files. This bug has been squashed (see image below)
• Display window of the software now also prints which direction the striped arena turns

A new platform have been designed for the optomotor response. It is placed on a pivot with the axis attached on the back. In contrast to the previous design witch only monitored movement in the left/right direction, the new design in theory allows the fly to rotate the platform.