Calcium Imaging of Drosophila Ex Vivo Brain for Epileptiform Analysis

To begin, perfuse the external solution with oxygenated saline for five minutes. With a pipette, transfer 10 microliters of the dissection solution to a Petri dish. Now, use syringe needles and a microscope to carefully dissect the brains of the anesthetized established wild type and knockout flies.

With a pipette, transfer the prepared brain into a recording dish with five milliliters of external solution. Immobilize the brains with a C sharp holder. Next, capture the confocal image of each brain at 20x.

Use the XYT scanning mode and identify the mushroom body neurons at an additional 4.5 times digital amplification. Set the laser excitation to 488 nanometers with 16 micro watt laser power to acquire the whole brain GCaMP6m emission. Then set the scanning parameters to 1400 speed with a pixel size of 256 by 256 pixels.

Set the acquisition rate to 5.3 hertz and record for three minutes. Analyze the fluorescence of five to eight regions of interest. Manually determine the cell body of mushroom body neurons as the region of interest.

Use image J to label the identified neurons and measure their fluorescence intensities. Analyze the fluorescence data of GCaMP6m as shown. Define the intracellular fluorescence increasing between two and 2.5 standard deviations as small spikes and those increasing more than 2.5 standard deviations as large spikes.

Calcium signals were observed in the mushroom body of flies. The cac knockdown flies showed more large spikes than small spikes.