Establishing Drosophila Behavioral Paradigms Analogous to Mammalian Anxiety and Depression Models. Lauren Stein, Kelly Hainz, Wendi Neckameyer. Pharmacology and Physiology, Saint Louis University School of Medicine, St. Louis, MO.

   Exposure to a variety of aversive environmental and physiological stressors can result in a series of neurochemical and behavioral changes having negative effects on both physical and mental health of an individual. It is important to identify the neural substrates involved in the stress response as well as develop simple, high throughput assays to screen for contributing factors. The goal of our research is to develop diverse paradigms to assay adaptive and maladaptive responses to stress. These include the forced swim test, grooming behavior, and the response to and recovery from the sedative effects of ethanol. We have previously demonstrated that the stress response circuits differ between males and females as well as sexually immature and mature animals. We exposed these populations to four different stressors and evaluate the varying parameters as an output measurement for translational studies in an effort to develop this paradigm to use in our screen for neural substrates mediating responses to stress.