Question: hi tora why do you race fruit flys and not other animals

Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 17 Nov 2014:

That’s a really good question — it’s a bit strange isn’t it, to work with fruit flies?

One of the reasons I work with them is that 75% of human disease–causing genes have related sequences in fruit flies & mutations often cause similar defects in flies as symptoms in human patients.

Also, fruit flies have been used in scientific research since the early 1900s, Thomas Hunt Morgan first confirmed the hypothesis that genes were found on chromosomes in flies. And since then, a lot of research has been done using flies, even ending up with Nobel prizes for fly research in 1933, 1946, 1995, and 2011.

Fly researchers have also introduced new ideas & innovative techniques that then get used in mouse models.

So much of what we know today about the human genome & biology is based on what was first discovered in this fruit flies! They are really easy to breed (egg to egg in 10 days! simple diet!), inexpensive, and small (only 2-3mm!) — so they can be used a lot in research.

My current work is on Parkinson’s disease — and flies really can have the same problems that people do with the brain disease! The mouse models aren’t really as similar to the human disease… Plus, I think that it’s so easy to find out new facts with a small easy animal to work with. & I don’t mind swatting them when they get loose either… 🙂

I study flies that have the same problems as people with Parkinson’s have, so they also have trouble moving. So the Parkinson’s flies don’t do very well in a climbing assay — race.

I put 8-12 of the type of flies I’m testing in 2 plastic test tubes stuck together with tape. I gently knock the flies to the bottom of the tubes.

In 10 seconds, only 1 or 2 of Parkinson’s flies out of 10 climb to the halfway point. For normal flies, 8 or 9 climb to the halfway point in 10 seconds.

So doing these races tells us about how well the flies move and probably is a good indicator of how many dead brain cells there are.

My experiments involve crossing in other defects with the Parkinson’s flies & I use the races to tell if these other defects in other proteins are involved with Parkinson’s.

Or I treat the Parkinson’s flies with new compounds my chemistry colleagues have made & see if the new compounds (drug possibilities!) can help the symptoms of the flies – do they climb better with the compounds!

So many of these experiments you just couldn’t do with other animals! They’re too big and take to long to grow or they just aren’t similar enough to the human disease to help! Weird, but true! 🙂