The forced swim test is commonly used as a preclinical screen of antidepressant medication efficacy in rats and mice. Neckameyer and Nieto-Romero (Stress 18:254–66, 2015) adopted the forced swim test for use with the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster and showed that behavior in this test is sensitive to several physiologically relevant stressors. However, whether this test might be sensitive to the effects of antidepressant medications or other compounds is unknown. In the current studies, we fed drugs to male and female flies that we expected to either decrease or increase the duration of immobility in the forced swim test, including fluoxetine, desipramine, picrotoxin, reserpine, 3-iodo-tyrosine, and ethanol. Fluoxetine was the only drug tested that affected behavior in this test, and surprisingly, the direction of the effect depended on the duration of feeding. Short-term (30 min) feeding of the drug prior to test resulted in the expected increase in latency to immobility, while a longer feeding duration (20–24 h) decreased this measure. These results suggest that the pharmacological profile of the fly FST is more restricted than that of the rat or mouse FST, and that the duration of drug exposure is an important consideration in pharmacological research using flies.

强迫游泳试验通常用作大鼠和小鼠抗抑郁药物疗效的临床前筛选。 Neckameyer 和 Nieto-Romero（Stress 18:254–66, 2015）采用了针对果蝇果蝇的强迫游泳测试，并表明该测试中的行为对几种生理相关的压力源很敏感。然而，该测试是否对抗抑郁药物或其他化合物的作用敏感尚不清楚。在目前的研究中，我们给雄性和雌性果蝇喂食药物，希望能够减少或增加强迫游泳测试中不动的持续时间，包括氟西汀、地昔帕明、印防己毒素、利血平、3-碘酪氨酸和乙醇。氟西汀是本次测试中唯一影响行为的药物，令人惊讶的是，影响的方向取决于喂养的持续时间。测试前短期（30 分钟）喂食药物会导致不动潜伏期增加，而较长的喂食时间（20-24 小时）会降低这一指标。这些结果表明，果蝇 FST 的药理学特征比大鼠或小鼠 FST 的药理学特征更受限制，并且药物暴露的持续时间是使用果蝇进行药理学研究的重要考虑因素。