Published: Vol 9, Iss 12, Jun 20, 2019 DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3268 Views: 7519
Reviewed by: Adler R. DillmanXiaoliang ZhaoAnonymous reviewer(s)
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Abstract
Sleep is a conserved neurobehavioral state observed in animals with sufficiently complex nervous systems and is critical for survival. While the exact function of sleep remains unknown, the lack of sleep can have a range of physiological and behavioral effects. Studies in invertebrates and vertebrates have identified conserved neural mechanisms and cellular pathways in control of sleep, wakefulness and arousal. Methodologies to measure sleep have ranged from EEG recordings in humans and rodents to in-depth analysis of locomotor patterns in flies, fish and worms. Here we focus on sleep measurements using activity monitoring in the highly versatile experimental model system, Drosophila melanogaster, which is amenable to a number of genetic, physiological and behavioral manipulations. Further, we also describe methods used to manipulate sleep and wakefulness to understand the neural regulation of sleep and how organisms balance sleep, wakefulness and behavioral arousal. Sleep as a behavioral state is regulated by a number of factors including food, environmental conditions, and genetic background. The methodologies described here provide, a high-throughput approach to study neural regulation of sleep and factors that affect this complex behavior.
Keywords: DrosophilaBackground
Sleep is defined as a state of quiescence that is associated with periods of inactivity, altered brain activity, and heightened sensory threshold. Across species, sleep is tightly regulated by the circadian clock and homeostatic mechanisms, and these processes have been studied extensively in the context of sleep regulation (Hendricks et al., 2000a and 2000b, Shaw et al., 2000, Donlea et al., 2017, Keene and Duboue, 2018, Bringmann, 2019). While the importance of these processes in sleep and wake cycling cannot be overstated, the dynamic regulation of sleep, wakefulness and arousal by other behavioral drives like social engagement and nutritional status have received less attention.
We recently investigated how sleep is regulated in light of competing behavioral drives like courtship and found that sleep is suppressed when the courtship drive is elevated, and courtship behavior is suppressed when sleep drive is increased by deprivation (Aso et al., 2014, Sitaraman et al., 2015a and 2015b, Chen et al., 2017). Here we describe the methods to measure and manipulate sleep amount (by mechanical deprivation and pharmacological treatments) and structure using the high-throughput activity monitoring system that is relatively easy to set-up and comparable to high-resolution video monitoring studies. The sleep recording protocol described here uses the well-established activity monitoring system relying on occlusion of infrared beam by movement of singly housed flies. While a previously published article describes the use of Drosophila activity monitoring system for circadian analysis and sleep, here emphasis is placed on the actual fly rearing, set-up of the activity monitors and circadian analysis (Chiu et al., 2010). Here, we describe the experimental set-up specific to sleep measurements and the detailed analysis of the locomotor data in interpreting sleep amount and architecture. The experimental amenability of the fruit fly system has and will continue to provide key insights into how sleep is influenced by neuronal and environmental factors with careful attention to experimental design, execution, and data interpretation.
Materials and Reagents
Equipment
Software
Procedure
Data analysis
The locomotor data represented as occlusion of IR beams is output as a .txt file with date and time stamp information. Each raw monitor data file has 32 channels, each channel representing a single sleep tube/fly, and must be converted to single channel files as 1- and 30-min bins for sleep analysis.
Recipes
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by NIH Grant # 1R15GM125073-01 to DS.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
References
Article Information
Copyright
© 2019 The Authors; exclusive licensee Bio-protocol LLC.
How to cite
Driscoll, M. E., Hyland, C. and Sitaraman, D. (2019). Measurement of Sleep and Arousal in Drosophila. Bio-protocol 9(12): e3268. DOI: 10.21769/BioProtoc.3268.
Category
Neuroscience > Behavioral neuroscience > Sleep and arousal
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