Page History

  Include PageMenuMenu

Two-photon calcium imaging from head-fixed Drosophila during optomotor walking behavior.

Johannes D Seelig*, M Eugenia Chiappe*, Gus K Lott*, Anirban Dutta, Jason E Osborne, Michael B Reiser & Vivek Jayaraman. Nature Methods (6 June 2010) | doi:10.1038/nmeth.1468

There is a long history of putting a tethered insect on a ball to measure its movements in response to controlled sensory stimuli. As mentioned in the publication, Karl Götz and Erich Buchner had fly-on-a-ball systems working almost four decades ago. Our system uses modern image processing technology to acquire, with high temporal resolution, velocity about all axes of rotation of the ball. The first system to use optical mouse sensors came from Berthold Hedwig's lab, which used them to monitor crickets walking on a ball.

Between the published paper and these files, we want to provide everything you need to build a complete fly-ball-tracker system. We apologize for any missing information, but will be happy to fix that if you let us know. We will improve the organization of this information in the coming weeks.
Zipped Autodesk Inventor CAD files for the tracker system are available here. TreadmillSystemFinal.iam is the top-level assembly.

Computer-to-chip communication issue with Windows 7 & the latest FTDI driver (TreadmillDemo throws a "Bad Read"):

...

Thanks go to Armin Bahl (MPI, Martinsried) for bringing this to our attention.

OTHER NOTES: A few people have asked what lenses and lighting we use. This is what our standard setup has (but you should be fine with alternatives too - just make sure your lens doesn't have an IR coating on it):

...

MATLAB code to calibrate the ball tracker using Camera3 (see paper) is available here.

The Janelia Farm Drosophila-physiology-on-a-ball team
 
Standing (l-r): Michael Reiser, Gus Lott, Vivek Jayaraman. Sitting (l-r): Johannes Seelig and Eugenia Chiappe. Other contributors (not pictured here) include: Nir Dutta, Jason Osborne. Photo credit: Reed George.