fruit fly

Study Shows How One Insect Got Its Wings
03/12/2013 - 09:22

Scientists have delved deeper into the evolutionary history of the fruit fly than ever before to reveal the genetic activity that led to the development of wings – a key to the insect’s ability to survive. The wings themselves are common research models for this and other species’ appendages. But until now, scientists did not know how the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, first sprouted tiny buds that became flat wings.

 

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Fruit flies force their young to drink alcohol -- for their own good
02/22/2013 - 10:33

When fruit flies sense parasitic wasps in their environment, they lay their eggs in an alcohol-soaked environment, essentially forcing their larvae to consume booze as a drug to combat the deadly wasps.

 

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When the cell’s two genomes collide
02/06/2013 - 07:51

Plant and animal cells contain two genomes: one in the nucleus and one in the mitochondria. When mutations occur in each, they can become incompatible, leading to disease. To increase understanding of such illnesses, scientists at Brown University and Indiana University have traced one example in fruit flies down to the individual errant nucleotides and the mechanism by which the flies become sick.

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Researchers probe protein linked to hereditary spastic paraplegia
10/08/2012 - 15:17

Rice University biochemist James McNew took a risk and changed his lab's model organism from yeast to fruit flies to study a key protein that's been linked to hereditary spastic paraplegia. The gamble paid off with a new grant from the National Institutes of Health.

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What 10,000 fruit flies have to tell us about differences between the sexes
07/20/2012 - 08:22

What do you get when you dissect 10 000 fruit-fly larvae? A team of researchers led by the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) in the UK and the Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics (MPI) in Germany has discovered a way in which cells can adjust the activity of many different genes at once. Their findings, published in the journal Science, overturn commonly held views and reveal an important mechanism behind gender differences.

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Dopamine – A substance with many messages
07/19/2012 - 07:59

Children quickly learn to avoid negative situations and seek positive ones. But humans are not the only species capable of remembering positive and negative events; even the small brain of a fruit fly has this capacity. Dopamine-containing nerve cells connected with the mushroom body of the fly brain play a role here. Scientists from the Max Planck Institute of Neurobiology in Martinsried have identified four different types of such nerve cells. Three of the nerve cell types assume various functions in mediating negative stimuli, while the fourth enables the fly to form positive memories.

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