Abstract

Synchronizing the endogenous clock of animals to artificially created light-dark cycles in the laboratory is a challenging task, because it needs a fully controllable, automatic lighting system that produces various light-dark cycles with changing spectral composition of high quality and fidelity. Here, we focus on the development of such a system for the model species Drosophila melanogaster. Meeting the technological objectives of this research, we introduce a user friendly, real time embedded, distributed, data management and multi-threading based system i.e. DroLIGHT-2, which is capable of controlling and automating an LED-based lighting system. In this manuscript, we briefly explore what DroLIGHT-2 is, its features, advancements, hardware, usage and pitfalls. We validate the software application with two and three dimensional presentation of the obtained results generated by DroLIGHT-2 and compare them with existing, our previously published solutions. We also discuss followed software engineering’ paradigm, used development life cycle, some designed application’ models with implementation and graphical user interface’ details. Moreover the paper also discusses few patents relevant to circadian-rhythm and real time embedded systems.

Keywords: Circadian-rhythm, drosophila, , diurnal rhythm, embedded systems, light-dark cycles, neurobiology, neuroinformatics.