Word: drosophila
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...Kravitz is hardly the only scientist so taken with the red-eyed bugs. While the antics of Drosophila melanogaster, as the fruit fly is known in scientific circles, may seem irrelevant at first blush, they are anything but. Remember, it was the fruit fly, which has been used in experiments of heredity for some 100 years and whose genome was fully decoded in 2000, that first educated us far more complex human beings about the way our genes work. In essence, it was on the tiny back of the fruit fly that scientists launched a genetic revolution. (See pictures...
...Along with information about social behaviors like aggression and fighting, fruit-fly research is beginning to yield insights into other complex behaviors, such as sleep. In two papers published today in Science, researchers find clues to the long-standing mystery of why humans need sleep, by studying the way Drosophila catches...
...That makes sense for a human. But exactly how much new information does a fruit fly acquire in a day? How complex could Drosophila's world be that it actually needs shut-eye to recharge its brain? You'd be surprised. For a fly, its brief, two-month life can only be about mating and eating - or eating and mating, depending on whether mates or food are in shorter supply - but these activities involve complex social interactions that, frankly, can be exhausting...
...That finding in and of itself isn't very revolutionary, but Kravitz was also able to link Drosophila's sex-specific behaviors to genes. When male flies were bred with the female version of the fighting gene, they tended to act like females, favoring head butts and shoves over the more aggressive lunges. Same went for the female flies bred with the male version of the gene - they acted more like male flies, often even attempting to mate with other females...
...morning to Friday night. To no one’s surprise, students have embraced this new schedule with overwhelming intensity. But to the dismay of a studious few and many of the library’s security guards, this intensity has not correlated in quiet reflection on Habermas and Drosophila genes; this intensity has been expressed in scenes of sheer outrageousness that rival even the best Harvard party. There are the traditional acts of sexual promiscuity, as any browser of Craigslist can see. For the lucky few who do find a match, a lockable storage closet on the second floor...