Exercise & Locomotion Studies
Impose controlled exercise regimes or analyze spontaneous locomotion. Automated systems for climbing assays, activity monitoring, and exercise endurance experiments.
How It Works
The flyGym imposes controlled physical activity on groups of Drosophila. Thirty-two standard vials are held in a motorised drum, four printed shelves of eight. Each rotation is a half turn that inverts the vials: the flies drop to what is now the bottom and climb back up, because they climb against gravity by reflex (negative geotaxis). Repeating that turn at a set rate is the exercise.
Protocols are built on the instrument itself. A program is a sequence of up to ten stages, and each stage sets how many minutes the drum turns, how many minutes it rests, how many turns per minute (up to 30), and how many turn/rest cycles to repeat — enough to build ramps, interval training or day-long low-intensity regimes. The controller is a standalone unit with an OLED display, a knob and a button; programs and run state live on a micro SD card, so no computer is attached to the experiment and an interrupted run resumes where it stopped.
The optional flyGym Tracker adds the readout. The drum is back-lit at 850 nm and imaged by a single monochrome camera, so flies appear as dark silhouettes and can be measured in the dark phase as well. The software gates out the rotations and, during the stationary dwells between them, differences successive frames inside each vial to produce a per-vial activity index over hours to days, together with a log of every rotation. It reports how much a group of flies is moving rather than following individual animals — the same activity-index approach as pySolo-Video and ethoscope. The tracker is in active development.
For free-movement studies, our video tracking system is the complementary tool: it captures the position and trajectory of individual flies in real time and extracts walking speed, total distance, rest periods and spatial preferences. It integrates with Bonsai for programmable protocols and live visualisation. Combine exercise and feeding assays on the same cohort of animals to study the relationship between activity and metabolism.
Exercise in Progress
A flyGym running its protocol, recorded through the tracker's infrared camera.
The flyGym drum turning, seen by the tracker camera
Infrared silhouette view of one drum face — 16 of the 32 vials, in two rows of 8. Two rotation events are visible: the vials invert, the flies fall, and they climb back up.
What You Can Measure
Two complementary readouts: a per-vial activity index from the flyGym Tracker, and individual trajectories from video tracking.
Per-Vial Activity
How much each group of flies is moving, as an activity index per vial per time bin — for up to 32 vials in parallel.
flyGym Tracker
Response to Exercise Bouts
Every rotation is timestamped in an events log alongside the activity table, so the response to each imposed bout — and the recovery between bouts — sits on the same timeline.
flyGym Tracker
Long-Term & Circadian Activity
Runs last hours to days, and infrared back-lighting means the dark phase is measured just like the light phase — so activity patterns across 24-hour cycles are captured directly.
flyGym Tracker
Decline Under a Regime
Compare the activity index across cohorts and across days to follow how a controlled exercise regime shifts performance over the course of an experiment.
flyGym Tracker
Walking Speed & Distance
Average and instantaneous velocity, distance travelled, and time spent moving versus resting, for individual flies.
Video Tracking
Spatial Preference
Occupancy maps and trajectories showing where flies spend their time in an arena.
Video Tracking
The flyGym Tracker is an activity-index system: it quantifies how much a group of flies moves, not the path of any one fly. Individual-fly measures come from the separate video tracking system.
Ready to study exercise and locomotion?
Get a quote for the flyGym, video tracking, or a combined setup for your locomotion research.