UC Berkeley expert on insect flight receives prestigious MacArthur 'genius' award
...hich he displays various moving scenes to tethered flies and records their wing motions. "Fly-o-rama" is like a small circus tent in which he records in three dimensions how a fly moves in response to various stimuli. Variations on these themes include a "rock-and-roll arena" in which he studies fly respon...Sexual vs. asexual reproduction: scientists find sex wins
... manipulate the fruit fly so that half were normal flies and half were asexual, and reproduced asexually (a situation that occurs in nature in several species, such as certain lizards and insects). "We created 17 populations that mixed genes and 17 that didnt," said Rice. "In other words, we had population...New pathway to understanding circadian rhythms
...ne of every 3,000 newborns. Sehgal obtained mutant flies with non-functioning Nf1 from co-author Andre Bern... see if we could establish normal rhythms in these flies by inserting Nf1 transgenes," said Sehgal. "And, indeed, we showed that we could restore normal rhyt...Fly genetics point to potential cancer-causing gene
...e Drosophila fruit fly. "We screened about 50,000 flies to look for mutations that gave cells a growth advantage during development of the eye," says Ken Moberg, PhD, the study?s lead author who isolated the gene. "Essentially, we were looking at cancer in the eye of the fly." Moberg says it was excitin...Does chromosome 4 hold the secret to human longevity?
...ecause in lower organisms such as nematodes, fruit flies and yeast there are only a few genes that need to be altered to give a longer life span. So, my feeling was that there were only a few genes, perhaps four to six in humans, that would do the same." Thus, Kunkel and his colleagues did a genome-wide co...How brain cells remember their birth order
...e set of four genes. According to Doe, while fruit flies are evolutionarily distant from mammals, the lesso...hasized that researchers still do not know whether flies and mammals use the same kinds of transcription factors to control neural development. However, he a...Component of fly saliva makes promising Leishmaniasis vaccine
...he infection. "People get bitten by infected sand flies all the time without developing leishmaniasis," sa...ten by a Leishmania-carrying fly before uninfected flies have had time to naturally immunize them." Dr. Ribeiro next plans to test his vaccine in dogs-natura...Plant response to light and stress
...isplays to the Calossin gene family found in worm, flies and humans. Putting out the fire: a role for IP3 in plant cell signaling Researchers at the University of Arizona have made a significant advance in understanding how plants respond to stress. The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) coordinates plant d...Tiny trickster flies into the zoological books
...wo closest familiesparasitise the larval stages of flies in leaf-litter, this is what wewould predict as the biology of the new family."...From flies to humans-ancient gene may be involved in male infertility
...pment, and this is very similar to what you see in flies that have mutations in this gene," says the lead author of the study, Eugene Yujun Xu, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the laboratory of senior author Renee A. Reijo Pera, PhD, a leading researcher on sperm-related infertility in men and a UCSF assista...UCSD biologists identify 548 genes in the fruit fly likely to play a role in human genetic diseases
...stral protein." Knowing which genes in fruit flies are the ancestral counterparts to genes that cause... simple genetic system that's well understood, and flies are inexpensive to rear and have a short generation time, enabling us to screen through thousands of...Scientists push enzyme evolution into high gear
... into Arabidopsis plants -- the experimental fruit flies of plant science -- and it works very well," Shanklin says. This process of "tuning up" enzymes, Shanklin says, might be useful to produce large quantities of other plant products. For example, he says, one day, plant products might be used to meet o...Understanding tuberous sclerosis
...either the TSC1 or TSC2 gene. By generating fruit flies deficient in TSC1, researchers from the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center have been able to determine that TSC1 and TSC2 antagonize insulin signaling and thereby regulate cell growth. TSC is characterized by the development of benign tu...UT Southwestern researchers show tumor-suppressor genes linked to insulin signaling
...ave, and the fly genome is easily mutated. Because flies reproduce and grow so quickly, gene functions can ...tients are resistant to the action of insulin. The flies with defective insulin receptors are similar to patients with diabetes. These flies had less insulin......W), a Groningen research team has investigated how flies react to the odours of such things as old pork, br...aintenance. Synthetic combinations of odours which flies find attractive would seem to be a more effective solution. In order to determine what substances ar...Scientists switch memory recall on and off in fruit flies
...r Laboratory have used a genetic strategy in fruit flies to switch electrical activity in the insect brain ...ing), storage, and retrieval (recall). By training flies to avoid an odorand by switching off electrical activity in the brain at different times during or a......ance in order to study them. Were talking fruit flies here. Drosophila melanogaster. And what we want...e too big to play by the same rules - but in fruit flies and hawkmoths, blowflies and lacewings. Why? So that we can learn to fabricate tiny search, explor...Sleep in early life may play crucial role in brain development
...persisted for decades. "Every animal sleeps - even flies may have a state like sleep. But despite great progress in our understanding of the regulation and neurobiology of sleep, as well as the consequences of sleep loss on human performance, why the brain needs sleep has remained a mystery," says Frank. ...New hope for neurodegenerative disease sufferers
... kinds of genes, the 14-3-3 genes, are turned off, flies have learning deficiencies, suggesting that 14-3-3...human learning. To find out, the scientists used flies stripped of their own 14-3-3 genes, and they inserted one of the human 14-3-3 genes in the flies. ...... the discovery very likely extend far beyond fruit flies to other animals, including humans, says Sean Carroll, a study author and developmental biologist. "Of all the genes in the genetic tool kit, very few shoulder the responsibility of commanding the development of an entire structure," Carroll says. "G...