DANCE (Drosophila Aggression and Courtship Evaluator), provides an accessible, affordable, and robust solution for quantifying aggression and courtship behaviors in Drosophila. The DANCE hardware is ~10,000X cheaper and has comparable performance to existing traditional set ups.
Key Features:
• Six machine learning-based classifiers: Developed using JAABA, these classifiers excel at quantifying aggressive lunges and five courtship behaviors—wing extension, circling, following, attempted copulation and copulation.
• Ultra-low-cost, portable hardware: Fabricated using off-the-shelf, repurposed materials like medicine blister packs, acrylic sheets and paper tape, with recordings done via smartphones and tablets/smartphone used as backlight source.
• Open-source pipeline: Designed to be user-friendly and accessible to conduct sophisticated behavioral analysis.
Figure: (A) DANCE hardware and recordings setup for acquisition of aggression and courtship behaviors. (B-C) Top and side views of the DANCE setup with a smartphone camera for recording and electronic tablet used as a backlight. (D-E) DANCE aggression and courtship arenas to record behaviors.
Getting started
• DANCE preprint details the hardware components and recording requirements.
• Behavioral Classifiers: Our JAABA-based classifiers (.jab) files are used to quantify aggression and courtship.
They can be downloaded at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1N75OinwMuYrkIT3qclAJThCvfOZMuotj?usp=drive_link
• Please download following software to get started with the DANCE pipeline:
FlyTracker - https://github.com/kristinbranson/FlyTracker
JAABA: Janelia Automatic Animal Behavior Annotator https://github.com/kristinbranson/JAABA
• Step by step analysis instructions: Please see the ‘DANCE_Analysis_step-by-step_instructions.md’ file.
Citing DANCE Preprint: DANCE: An open-source analysis pipeline and low-cost hardware to quantify aggression and courtship in Drosophila’, Yadav, R.S.P., Dey P., Ansari F., Kottat T., Prabhu PP., Vasam M., Ayyangar, S., Bhaskar S, S., Prabhu, K., Ghosh, M. and Agrawal, P. doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.01.03.631168, bioRxiv, January 4th, 2025.
Patent information
The hardware is described in a patent application with the Indian Patent Office, titled: ‘Device for Measuring Complex Social Behaviors In Small Insects’. Application number: 202441072884. Inventors: Dr. Pavan Kumar Agrawal, Faizah Ansari, Rachagolla Saiprathap Yadav.