Analysis of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms from Drosophila Activity-Monitoring Data Using SCAMP

Christopher G Vecsey; Casey Koochagian; Maria T Porter; Gregg Roman; Divya Sitaraman

doi:10.1101/pdb.prot108182

Analysis of Sleep and Circadian Rhythms from Drosophila Activity-Monitoring Data Using SCAMP

Cold Spring Harb Protoc. 2024 Feb 9. doi: 10.1101/pdb.prot108182. Online ahead of print.

Authors

Christopher G Vecsey¹, Casey Koochagian², Maria T Porter³, Gregg Roman⁴, Divya Sitaraman⁵

Affiliations

¹ Neuroscience Program, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York 12866, USA cvecsey@skidmore.edu divya.sitaraman@csueastbay.edu.
² Neuroscience Program, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York 12866, USA.
³ Department of Biology, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi 38677, USA.
⁴ Department of Psychology, College of Science, California State University, Hayward, California 94542, USA.
⁵ Department of Biomolecular Sciences, University of Mississippi, Oxford, Mississippi 38677, USA cvecsey@skidmore.edu divya.sitaraman@csueastbay.edu.

PMID: 38336392
DOI: 10.1101/pdb.prot108182

Abstract

Sleep is a fundamental feature of life for virtually all multicellular animals, but many questions remain about how sleep is regulated and what biological functions it plays. Substantial headway has been made in the study of both circadian rhythms and sleep in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, much of it through studies of individual fly activity using beam break counts from Drosophila activity monitors (DAMs). The number of laboratories worldwide studying sleep in Drosophila has grown from only a few 20 years ago to hundreds today. The utility of these studies is limited by the quality of the metrics that can be extracted from the data. Many software options exist to help analyze DAM data; however, these are often expensive or have significant limitations. Therefore, we describe here a method for analyzing DAM-based data using the sleep and circadian analysis MATLAB program (SCAMP). This user-friendly software has an advantage of combining several analyses of both sleep and circadian rhythms in one package and produces graphical outputs as well as spreadsheets of the outputs for further statistical analysis. The version of SCAMP described here is also the first published software package that can analyze data from multibeam DAM5Ms, enabling determination of positional preference over time.

Abstract

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