Resources and tutorials

Here we provide video tutorials and other resources to help other research laboratories use the approaches and tools that we have developed. Some of these approaches require surgical manipulation of animals. We do our best to reduce the number of animals we use for experiments. We also make every effort to minimize harm. Our investigation of flies (Drosophila melanogaster) is in line with a general effort to Replace, Reduce, and Refine in animal research. Please see these links for more information about more about the 3Rs in general, in Switzerland, and at EPFL.


How to pin tether flies.
(prepared by Gizem Özdil)


Dissection reported in Chen, Hermans et al., Nature Communications 2018. This approach was used in Chen et al., Nature Neuroscience 2023 and Aymanns et al., Elife 2022.

How to perform the VNC imaging dissection.
(prepared by Chin-Lin Chen)


Tools and approach reported in Hermans, Kaynak et al., Nature Communications 2022

Fabricating thoracic implants
Fabricating thoracic windows
Fabricating the manipulator arm
Fabricating the remounting stage

Mounting and unmounting flies from the remounting stage

Implant and window surgical procedure

Fabrication Protocols (updated 220411)



Code and approach reported in Gosztolai, Günel et al., Nature Methods 2022


Code and approach reported in Günel et al., Elife 2019

Code to perform sequential inverse kinematics and obtain joint angles from 3D poses (Gizem Özdil et al., 2024)


Explore a whole body micro-CT scan of the fly from Schoborg et al., Development 2019
Other useful scans of the fly
(curated and prepared by Jasper Phelps)