Organismal Core Services & Fees

We can perform the following healthspan measures. Healthspan measures may either be performed on flies brought to the Nathan shock or raised in-house.

Muscle/Locomotion Function: Negative geotaxis (climbing assay) with or without exercise, including analyses.

Muscle Function: Muscle Performance (Flight test) with or without exercise, including analyses.

Behaviors and Circadian: Circadian activity and sleep analyses (Using DAM activity monitor, 32 vial capacity).

• Gut Integrity: (smurf assay).
• Learning and Memory: Olfaction Aversion Training (learning and memory).
• Cardiac Physiology: Beating pattern of the heart (semi-intact heart preparation followed by beat-by-beat recording, followed by analyses) .

We will conduct lifespan studies on the capacity of potential drug/known drug, exercise, or genetic intervention to extend Drosophila's lifespan. A typical experiment of 40 vials run for 70-100 days.

Potential drug/known drug: Compounds/Drugs will be formulated into fly food at a range of doses (we recommend a dosage curve of 4 doses). Flies will be fed the drug until natural death. Animals will be transferred to new food and survival scored every 2-3 days (MWF).  Evaluations may be performed in W1118 flies, Canton-S flies, Oregon-R flies, males, mated females, and virgin females. We will evaluate 200-250 flies per condition. 

Exercise: Like the health span, we will be able to perform lifespan studies to evaluate the impact of exercise on lifespan. Evaluations of lifespan can be performed on wild- type (indicated above) and specific genetic modulation backgrounds.

Genetic: Gene overexpression or knockdown studies may be performed. This can either be performed by lines sent to us or we can assist in line selection. Costs: (varies by experiment design, please discuss).

Additional measures: In the future, we will also be able to perform behavior/feeding fasting-mediated interventions called “Time-Restricted Feeding (TRF), and Dietary Restriction (DR). In recent years, both interventions have had a significant impact on health and life span.