Visual Behavior in Flies — Course Guide

Welcome! These pages are your reference for running fly-on-ball experiments on the G6 LED-arena rigs. Read them in roughly this order; each page is short and practical.

Feedback welcome. This equipment is brand new: the rigs are less than a month old, and much of the course software, including Arena Studio, is only about 10 days old. If you see something confusing, broken, missing, or worth improving in the course, experiments, rigs, or software, please tell us. You can send feedback directly to the instructors or open a course feedback issue.

Course team

  • Instructors: Michael Reiser and Frank Loesche.
  • Rig assembly and testing: many people in the Reiser Lab helped assemble, test, and troubleshoot these rigs, especially Hannah Marie Santos and Isabel Lehenbauer.
  • Fly work and genotypes: Ed Rogers.

“Flies are cheap.”
— Michael Dickinson

Don’t hold back.

Plan and schedule

Time Focus
10:30-noon Meet at the rigs for a brief setup orientation and tethering demonstration, then work hands-on: tether, mount one fly, and run P0. P0 is a calibration protocol: it asks which stimulation levels are most effective for that genotype on that rig.
After lunch-5:30 Bootstrap P1 and P2 across genotypes: different groups begin with different flies, run short protocols first, and collect high-quality data. At roughly hourly check-ins, we will compare results, troubleshoot, and decide together which genotypes or effects deserve more runs.
Late afternoon Review promising results in the dashboard. Once core P1/P2 data are in hand, teams may try an instructor-approved variation or a new pattern.
After evening lecture P3 closed-loop conditioning: an exploratory, instructor-led experiment.

Goals for the day

Morning — learn the rig, tether, and run P0

Everyone should tether at least one fly and become comfortable with the rig before lunch:

  1. Open Arena Studio and connect to the rig.
  2. In the Editor, open P0 first and trace its sequence so you understand what the protocol will do.
  3. Explore the Console: browse patterns, display several patterns at different speeds and directions (including a negative speed), try modes 2 and 3, and drive the optogenetic LED.
  4. On a fly-on-ball rig, start FicTrac and connect Arena Studio to it through the bridge.
  5. Switch to the Run tab and inspect the live oscilloscope: identify the forward and turning signals and watch how they change with commands.
  6. Run P0 before lunch.

Afternoon — collect useful behavioral data

Keep tethering and running flies. The immediate goal is n=2 good flies in a selected protocol; n=4-5 is a realistic target for analyzable data. Work with one or both of P1 and P2, collecting multiple flies in each condition.

Evening — explore conditioning

Use optogenetic and visual stimuli to explore closed-loop conditioning in walking flies, adapting classic experiments from Martin Heisenberg and colleagues. This is exploratory, but if something seems to work, lock it in and collect enough data to ask whether it replicates.

Start here

  1. Tethering basics — gluing a fly to a pin and getting it on the ball.
  2. Rig 101 — what’s on the bench and what each part does.
  3. FicTrac basics & config — the ball tracker: what it does and how to set it up.
  4. Arena Studio — the web app you run experiments from (getting started + links).
  5. Pattern Editor — make and preview LED-arena patterns.
  6. GitHub for the course — where protocols and data live, and how they get there.

The experiments

Reference

Updated 2026-07-10 08:48 ET.

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