Fruit flies crucial to basic research
Monday, March 30, 2015 - 09:00
in Biology & Nature
The world around us is full of amazing creatures. My favorite is an animal the size of a pinhead, that can fly and land on the ceiling, that stages an elaborate (if not beautiful) courtship ritual, that can learn and remember… I am talking about the humble fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. By day, a tiny bug content to live on our food scraps. By night, the superhero that contributes to saving millions of human lives as one of the key model systems of modern biomedical research.