Once the fly is attached, the robot uses machine vision to analyse the fly’s physical attributes, sort the flies by male and female, and even carry out a micro-dissection to reveal the fly’s minuscule brain. Then, a tiny, narrow suction tube strikes one of the illuminated thoraxes, painlessly sucking onto the fly and lifting it up. The robot can recognize each individual fly by its reflection pattern. When it’s ready to grab a fly, it flashes a brief infra-red blast of light that is invisible to the flies and reflects off the animals’ thoraxes, indicating the location of each inhabitant. The robot’s fly-snatching apparatus looks like nothing so much as a miniature UFO hovering over a plate of unsuspecting flies.
The group did one study of 1,000 flies in 10 hours, a task that would have taken much longer for even a highly skilled human. “For example, it can do studies with large numbers of flies inspected in very precise ways.” “Robotic technology offers a new prospect for automated experiments and enables fly researchers to do several things they couldn’t do previously,” Schnitzer says.
Now a team led by Mark Schnitzer, an associate professor of biology and of applied physics at Stanford University, has introduced a solution to the tedium: a robot that can visually inspect awake flies and, even better, carry out behavioural experiments that were impossible with anaesthetized flies. Underlying every significant discovery from fruit fly research-and there have been many, relating to almost every aspect of our own biology-is daily, monotonous time spent by scientists toiling over plastic dishes of conked-out flies. Since the early 20th century, an unheralded star of genetics research has been a small and essentially very annoying creature: the fruit fly.
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