Article abstract

Nature Methods 6, 297 - 303 (2009)
Published online: 8 March 2009 | Corrected online: 22 March 2009 | doi:10.1038/nmeth.1310

Automated monitoring and analysis of social behavior in Drosophila

Heiko Dankert1,2, Liming Wang2, Eric D Hoopfer2, David J Anderson2 & Pietro Perona1

We introduce a method based on machine vision for automatically measuring aggression and courtship in Drosophila melanogaster. The genetic and neural circuit bases of these innate social behaviors are poorly understood. High-throughput behavioral screening in this genetically tractable model organism is a potentially powerful approach, but it is currently very laborious. Our system monitors interacting pairs of flies and computes their location, orientation and wing posture. These features are used for detecting behaviors exhibited during aggression and courtship. Among these, wing threat, lunging and tussling are specific to aggression; circling, wing extension (courtship 'song') and copulation are specific to courtship; locomotion and chasing are common to both. Ethograms may be constructed automatically from these measurements, saving considerable time and effort. This technology should enable large-scale screens for genes and neural circuits controlling courtship and aggression.

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  1. Division of Engineering and Applied Science, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.
  2. Division of Biology, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.

Correspondence to: David J Anderson2 e-mail: wuwei@caltech.edu

Correspondence to: Pietro Perona1 e-mail: perona@caltech.edu

* NOTE: In the version of this article initially published online, an attribution was omitted. The observation that genetic feminization of cholinergic neurons increases aggression was originally reported in abstract form (Y.B. Chan and E.A. Kravitz, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Neurobiology of Drosophila Abstracts, 42, 2005). The error has been corrected for the print, PDF and HTML versions of this article.

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