Author(s): Silva, Teresa Margarida Figueiredo
Date: 2016
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/22037
Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Subject(s): Courtship; Female receptivity behaviour; Mating; Drosophila melanogaster; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Médica
Courtship behaviour is the means for the animals to select their partner for reproduction. The fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, exhibit a complex courtship behaviour. Nearly all studies of D. melanogaster courtship have focused exclusively on the male behaviour. Female pre-copulatory behaviour is often relegated to ‘accepting’ or ‘rejecting’ of mating, and how females interact with males remains largely unknown. The aim of this study is to quantify and describe the mating behaviour of the female D. melanogaster. D. melanogaster is a model system that offers many genetic tools and when coupled with the recent technologies for neuronal manipulation, mapping and behavioural characterization, it has the potential to reveal the neurons involved in a particular behaviour. We analyzed the behaviour of the wild-type (WT) female fly by collecting information of the flies’ position during courtship using a tracking system and by automatically detecting specific behaviours using an automatic classifier. We found that WT flies displayed courtship acts and mating responses differently depending on their geographical origin strains. The automatic classes were developed in a machine learning system, to allow a faster and reliable behavioural analysis. In future work, the automatic classes developed in this research will be key to continue the female behaviour characterization.
