Quantifying Drosophila adults with the use of a smartphone

A method for automation of imago quantifying and fecundity assessment in Drosophila with the use of mobile devices running Android operating system is proposed. The traditional manual method of counting the progeny takes a long time and limits the opportunity of making large-scale experiments. Thus, the development of computerized methods that would allow us to automatically make a quantitative estimate of Drosophila melanogaster fecundity is an urgent requirement. We offer a modification of the mobile application SeedCounter that analyzes images of objects placed on a standard sheet of paper for an automatic calculation of D. melanogaster offspring or quantification of adult flies in any other kind of experiment. The relative average error in estimates of the number of flies by mobile app is about 2% in comparison with the manual counting and the processing time is six times shorter. Study of the effects of imaging conditions on accuracy of flies counting showed that lighting conditions do not significantly affect this parameter, and higher accuracy can be achieved using high-resolution smartphone cameras (8 Mpx and more). These results indicate the high accuracy and efficiency of the method suggested. This article has an associated First Person interview with the first author of the paper.