It all started when we developed a new methodology to study general anaesthesia in the fly (Kottler et al, 2013). As general anaesthesia is characterized by the loss of responsiveness to noxious stimuli we developed a simple approach where flies were recorded for only 1min before and after the stimuli. Then we applied this methodology to look at stimuli response across day and night. This is how we explored the sleep intensity dynamics in Drosophila (van alphen et al, 2013). While pioneering, this study couldn’t help moving the field forward as it was too restrictive technically. The program had to be user-friendly without requiring extensive coding knowledge. Moreover, not every institute can have access to a workshop to design the hardware.
This is why we decided to put our energy in developing robust, reliable, easily adaptable methodology offering freedom to the users to design their experiments and to analyse their results.
We developed and keep on developing the DART system (Faville & Kottler, et al., 2015) but also offer the hardware equipment.