Correlation between Time and Climbing Success in Drosophila: Comparison in Normal and Stressed Conditions

Abstract

The Drosophila Climbing Assay (DCA) is often used when Drosophila is positioned as a model organism to study the effects of disease or environmental conditions. The purpose of this study was to analyze the consistency of the relationship between the two variables of climbing ability in fly imago, both under normal conditions and under stress conditions. The predictor variable of this study was the duration of climbing, while the criterion variable was climbing success. A total of 72 experimental units were prepared and divided into 3 conditions, i.e., 24 fly bottles cultured on normal medium, 24 fly bottles cultured for one generation on leadcontaining medium, and 24 others cultured for two generations on leadcontaining medium. The results of the Spearman's Rho correlation test indicated that the duration of climbing duration was always significantly negatively correlated with climbing success in all three conditions: natural conditions (rs=-0.438, p=0.032), stress over a generation (rs=-0.864, p<0.001), as well as stress for two generations (rs=-0.436, p=0.033). Furthermore, the results of the parallelism test report that the three lines were not parallel (p<0.05). The slope of the regression line on the normal condition data was clearly different from the stress condition data for two generations. Through the scatter plot, the two regression lines intersect. Both variables are consistently proven to have a significant relationship and can show different levels of influence when implemented under certain stress conditions.