CHIP ON FLY – Design and Development of a Novel Platform for RFD Tagging and Detection of Drosophila Melanogaster
Deepak Choudhury,
Research Scientist,
Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology
Radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging has shown promising results in tracking multiple animals simultaneously to assess their locomotive and social behavior. It allows distinct individual identification over a period of time while simplifying the data processing, which is often long and complicated when there is a large sample size. RFID has been used in behavioral studies of honeybees and ants as well as other larger animals such as mice but it has not yet been explored on Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly is commonly used as a model for genetics and functional biology. By attaching a RFID tag called the p-Chip onto the flies using a suitable adhesive, an individualized tracking system of the flies can be developed. In this project, we figured out the glue and gluing mechanism that works the best among a few other adhesives as a bonding layer between the p-Chip and the fly scutum. A fly jig was developed to successfully increase the rate of p-Chip attachment from 2 tagged flies per hour to ~10 tagged flies per hour. The survivability of the tagged flies (15 male & 15 female) followed similar trend as control flies and in some cases even better over 26 days. Afterwards a Novel Fly RFID Tracking System was developed which detects simultaneous fly feeding and their unique identification. This is the ffirst study in the world to demonstrate RFID based detection of fruit flies which is useful for labs worldwide doing Drosophila research (population based studies).
|
|
