DVT: a high-throughput analysis pipeline for locomotion and social behavior in adult Drosophila melanogaster

BACKGROUND: Drosophila melanogaster is excellent animal model for understanding the molecular basis of human neurological and motor disorders. The experimental conditions and chamber design varied between studies. Moreover, most previously established paradigms focus on fly trace detection algorithm development. A comprehensive understanding on how fly behaves in the chamber is still lacking. RESULTS: In this report, we established 74 unique behavior metrics quantifying spatiotemporal characteristics of adult fly locomotion and social behaviors, of which 49 were newly proposed. By the aiding of the developed analysis pipeline, Drosophila video tracking (DVT), we identified siginificantly different patterns of fly behavior confronted with different chamber height, fly density, illumination and experimental time. Meanwhile, three fly strains which are widely used as control lines, Canton-S(CS), w(1118) and Oregon-R (OR), were found to exhibit distinct motion explosiveness and exercise endurance. CONCLUSIONS: We believe the proposed behavior metrics set and pipeline should help identify subtle spatial and temporal differences of drosophila behavior confronted with different environmental factors or gene variants. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s13578-023-01125-0.