Jeffrey Hall designed this device in the early 1980s to study how fruit flies follow the fluctuations of day and night. The circadian rhythm is rooted in the genes of both animals and plants. With this device, Hall and Michael Rosbash could record the activity of fruit flies with genetic variations. The flies were placed in small compartments. To register their movements, the researchers used beams of infrared light that were broken when a fly passed.
The graph shows the activities of the fruit flies.
Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash donated the apparatus and the graph to the Nobel Prize Museum in 2017.
