What this means
The authors built a cheaper, faster tool for measuring how long fruit flies live. They say it cut handling time by about 85 percent, but this early work is not yet checked by other scientists.
Plain-English summary written by an AI model from the abstract. The original is below.
- Who it was tested in
- Fruit flies (Drosophila) in lab vials
- Kind of research
- Early results, not yet checked by other scientists
The science
- Original title
- Drosben, an affordable system for scalable survival analysis in Drosophila
- Authors
- Trinca, T. M., Berenguer-Molins, P., Fernandez-Garcia, C. et al.
- Journal
- bioRxiv (preprint, not yet peer reviewed)
- Published
- Oct 14, 2026
- Study type
- Preprint
Abstract
Survival analysis is a workhorse assay in Drosophila research to evaluate somatic fitness. It is indispensable in the study of ageing and insightful in immunity, metabolism, radiobiology, toxicology, ecology, and others. While conceptually simple, lifespan measurement is labour-intensive because it requires the continuous manual maintenance of large experimental cohorts. Here, we describe Drosben, an approach that combines a 3D-printed device to transfer flies from several vials simultaneously, a paper system for quick data recording and accompanying software that automatically digitalises life tables for analysis. We show that using Drosben reduces the time investment to perform lifespan assays by ~85% respect to handling individual vials, with improved speed regardless of user experience handling these. Using Drosben, we address the effects on longevity of chronic feeding of indole-acetic acid (IAA), naphthalene-acetic acid (NAA) and trimethoprim (TMP) - compounds used to control heterologous targeted protein degradation systems. We find that IAA and NAA mildly shorten lifespan, while TMP extends female longevity. We further show that strong static magnetic fields do not affect Drosophila lifespan. Our work suggests that Drosben can cheaply accelerate research where lifespan is used as a life history trait.
Trinca, T. M., Berenguer-Molins, P., Fernandez-Garcia, C. et al. Drosben, an affordable system for scalable survival analysis in Drosophila. bioRxiv. 2026. doi:10.64898/2026.07.02.736118. https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.02.736118