Obesity In Drosophila

Dear All,

I am new to these groups and somewhat stumbled across it if i'm
honest, currently I am a final year student at the University of Leeds
and for my research project I will be using drosophila.

The current idea is to take a group of obese drosophila and a group of
lean drosophila and identify how obesity may/or may not effect their
sleep patterns and identify possible reasons why. Hopefully I will
gain some interesting results that are meaningful as obesity and sleep
are big issues at the moment.

My question is how to make an obese drosophila? My intention was to
make a group of drosophila gorge on a high fat feed, but getting this
to occur maybe difficult and I was wondering if anybody knew a good
way on how to get obese flies?

I currently have a few ideas:
1. Starve the drosophila for a period then add a high fat food source
so hopefully they over eat
2. Try keeping the drosophila in a very small confined space with a
high fat food source
3. I am in the process of reading: 'A glucagon-like endocrine pathway
in Drosophila modulates both lipid and carbohydrate homeostasis
K. N. Bharucha,1* P. Tarr,2 and S. L. Zipursky2' here it mentions AKHR
mutants being obese, and so i was going to look into the possibility
of getting some of these mutants or creating them.

I must add that this is very much only an idea and work has not begun
properly yet, but any ideas on this plan or any helpful advice would
be appreciated immensely.

Thank-you

Joseph Kelly

contact emails: [Only registered users see links. ]
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[Emily.Koury]

I'm not sure about the feasibility of your idea but I just wanted to suggest for any quantification of "obesity" of flies, I would dissect the flies and weigh the dry weight of adipose tissue since fly abdomens shrink and plump up in a matter of minutes when given food after deprivation. My guess is it would be very hard to decide on what is a "obese" versus "skinny" fly.