Why flies?

As most of you are probably aware, I did the vast majority of my research in college on Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly. At about 2.5 mm in length, you've probably seen them hanging around trashcans snacking on whatever they can find! As you can probably imagine, having to justify why I did research in flies to both family and friends proved to be very tiring. Why don't I work on something real, like cancer research (spoiler alert - this can also be done in flies)?

Figure 1: Drosophila melanogaster

All around the world, thousands of researchers spend countless hours and millions of dollars studying the intricacies of these little guys (they're kind of cute, right?). In her first speech on her domestic policy plan during the 2008 elections, Sarah Palin famously scoffed at the idea of fruit flies ever being used for the public good:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCXqKEs68Xk

In her defense, the leap from flies to humans seems pretty extreme. How can any information about people be extracted from a bug? The answer to this question (and the answer to many other questions biology) can be boiled down to one thing: evolution.

Thousands of years and hundreds of speciation events later, we as humans are related to many other critters in various ways. As it turns about, about 75% of known human disease genes have matches in the fruit fly genome and 50% of protein sequences in flies are also similar in humans. This allows us to study many diseases relevant to us without experimenting on actual people. You know, ethics and stuff. This is also why we continue to do research on other model organisms, such as mice or rats. Fruit flies also carry many other advantages, such as:

1. Their cost of care and culture is low

2. They have rapid generation times, allowing us to study many generations of flies within a relatively short amount of time.

3. They have only four chromosomes, making genetic analysis much simpler

And many many more. There have been three Noble prizes awarded to fly research and the use of our little friends in the laboratory has lead to discoveries in fields ranging from neuroscience to developmental biology. So before you think of fruit fly research being frivolous, remember that the alternative would be experimenting on YOU!