Novel hypnotics of Japanese traditional herbal medicines to caffeine-induced insomnia in Drosophila by using Newly-developed automated sleep and rhythm analysis system (AutoCircaS)

•We developed new automated sleep and rhythm analysis system (AutoCircaS) which can detect the sleep duration analysis of flies (Drosophila) and small fishes (Oryzias latipes).•AutoCircaS showed the caffeine-induced insomnia and the circadian rhythm of close-proximity (CP) for mating behavior in flies.•Japanese traditional herbal medicines, KyushinKannouGan-ki (KKG), NouKassei (NK) as well as Sansoninto, improved the caffeine-induced insomnia in flies. Sleep in Drosophila was defined in the year 2000 by using Drosophila Activity Monitor (DAM) system. But DAM is very small tube space and one fly per tube is very limited to analyze for fly social behavior. To overcome such demerits of DAM system, we developed a novel automated sleep and rhythm analysis system (AutoCircaS) which monitors and records any behaviors like social mating, sleep, and circadian rhythm in flies (Drosophila) and small fishes medaka (Oryzias latipes) in free space using the time-lapse (one frame per 10 sec) imaging. AutoCircaS can detect the caffeine-induced insomnia in flies in light-dark (LD) and constant dark (DD) conditions. Thus, using the AutoCircaS, we discovered that Japanese traditional herbal medicines, KyushinKannouGan-ki (KKG), NouKassei (NK) as well as, and Sansoninto, significantly improved caffeine-induced insomnia in flies. The data suggest that AutoCircaS is useful for sleep analysis of small animals and screening of new sedative-hypnotics from many origins.