Pre-Pulse Inhibition of an escape response in adult fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster

TL;DR

This paper shows that fruit flies have a startle response similar to mammals, which can help study mental disorders using simpler models.

Contribution

The study introduces a new method to measure PPI in fruit flies and links it to genes associated with schizophrenia.

Findings

Drosophila exhibits PPI with parameters similar to mammals.

Reduced Dysbindin and altered Nmdar1 expression affect PPI in flies.

Using Drosophila can reduce reliance on mammalian models for mental disorder research.

Abstract

Pre-Pulse Inhibition (PPI) is a neural process where suppression of a startle response is elicited by preceding the startling stimulus (Pulse) with a weak, non-startling one (Pre-Pulse). Defective PPI is widely employed as a behavioural endophenotype in humans and mammalian disorder-relevant models for neuropsychiatric disorders. We have developed a user-friendly, semi-automated, high-throughput-compatible Drosophila light-off jump response PPI paradigm, with which we demonstrate that PPI, with similar parameters measured in mammals, exists in adults of this model organism. We report that Drosophila PPI is affected by reduced expression of Dysbindin and both reduced and increased expression of Nmdar1 (N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor 1), perturbations associated with schizophrenia. Studying the biology of PPI in an organism that offers a plethora of genetic tools and a complex and well characterized connectome will greatly facilitate our efforts to gain deeper insight into the aetiology of human mental disorders, while reducing the need for mammalian models.

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