Question: Why are you interested in fruit flies?

Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 10 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.

I was working on human cells in culture dishes in my last couple of jobs & I just think there’s so much more exciting things you can do with flies — breed them and learn all sort of things! My current work is on Parkinson’s disease — and flies really can have the same problems that people do with the brain disease! I think that it’s so easy to find out new fact with a small easy animal to work with. & I don’t mind swatting them when they get loose either… 🙂