The Hillary Climber trumps manual testing: an automatic system for studying Drosophila climbing

Climbing or negative geotaxis is an innate behavior of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. There has been considerable interest in using this simple behavior to gain insights into the changes in brain function associated with aging, influence of drugs, mutated genes, and human neurological disorders. At present, most climbing tests are conducted manually and there is a lack of a simple and automatic device for repeatable and quantitative analysis of fly climbing behavior. Here we present an automatic fly climbing system, named the Hillary Climber (after Sir Edmund Hillary), that can replace the human manual tapping of vials with a mechanical tapping mechanism to provide more consistent force and reduce variability between the users and trials. Following tapping the HC records fly climbing, tracks the fly climbing path, and analyzes the velocity of individual flies and the percentage of successful climbers. The system is relatively simple to build, easy to operate, and efficient and reliable for climbing tests.