About

Made in a fly lab, for fly labs.

Ethoscopes were developed in the Gilestro Lab at Imperial College London, to study sleep in Drosophila at a scale that commercial systems could not reach, and to interact with each animal while recording it. The first version was built and described by Quentin Geissmann, Luis Garcia Rodriguez, Esteban Beckwith, Alice French, Arian Jamasb and Giorgio Gilestro. Laurence Blackhurst wrote ethoscopy.

The project has been open from the start, and labs around the world now build and run their own ethoscopes.

  1. 2009pySolo, the lab’s first software for analysing Drosophila sleep, is published.
  2. 2011The code history of the ethoscope begins, as video tracking grows out of pySolo.
  3. 2015The ethoscope repository goes public on GitHub.
  4. 2017Ethoscopes are described in PLoS Biology.
  5. 2019rethomics, the R framework for the analysis, is published in PLoS ONE.
  6. 2023ethoscopy and ethoscope-lab bring the analysis to Python.