Muscle Function Assessment Using a Drosophila Larvae Crawling Assay

Here we describe a simple method to measure larval muscle contraction and locomotion behavior. The method enables the user to acquire data, without the necessity of using expensive equipment ( Rotstein et al., 2018 ). To measure contraction and locomotion behaviour, single larvae are positioned at the center of a humidified Petri dish. Larval movement is recorded over time using the movie function of a consumer digital camera. Subsequently, videos are analyzed using ImageJ ( Rueden et al., 2017 ) for distance measurements and counting of contractions. Data are represented as box or scatter plots using GraphPad Prism (^©GraphPad Software).