Wong, R;
Piper, MDW;
Wertheim, B;
Partridge, L;
(2009)
Quantification of Food Intake in Drosophila.
PLOS ONE
, 4
(6)
, Article e6063. 10.1371/journal.pone.0006063.
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Abstract
Measurement of food intake in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is often necessary for studies of behaviour, nutrition and drug administration. There is no reliable and agreed method for measuring food intake of flies in undisturbed, steady state, and normal culture conditions. We report such a method, based on measurement of feeding frequency by proboscis-extension, validated by short-term measurements of food dye intake. We used the method to demonstrate that (a) female flies feed more frequently than males, (b) flies feed more often when housed in larger groups and (c) fly feeding varies at different times of the day. We also show that alterations in food intake are not induced by dietary restriction or by a null mutation of the fly insulin receptor substrate chico. In contrast, mutation of takeout increases food intake by increasing feeding frequency while mutation of ovo(D) increases food intake by increasing the volume of food consumed per proboscis-extension. This approach provides a practical and reliable method for quantification of food intake in Drosophila under normal, undisturbed culture conditions.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Quantification of Food Intake in Drosophila |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pone.0006063 |
| Publisher version: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0006063 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2009 Wong et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. The Wellcome Trust (MP and LP), the Medical Research Council (RW) and NERC (BW) provided funding for this work. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Genetics, Evolution and Environment |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/141008 |
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