Fruit Flies

Scientists have used the CRISPR gene-editing tool to give fruit flies a new evolutionary advantage – the ability to eat poison and store it in their bodies.

With Christmas just behind us and New Year’s around the corner, many are familiar with the effects of alcohol, but how it works in the brain is still shrouded in mystery. Now scientists at the Scripps Research Institute have discovered a new step in the intoxication process – by getting flies drunk.

A team has successfully developed a combination of herbal supplements and probiotics that can prolong the longevity of fruit flies by 60 percent. The technique is one of the first to successfully show a treatment that modulates the gut microbiome can result in potent lifespan-extending effects.

From the time we choose whether to hit the snooze button or get up, we make countless decisions every day, but just how the brain manages this mundane task is still shrouded in mystery. Now, researchers at Oxford University have observed in detail the mechanism that lets fruit flies make decisions.

Rather than focusing on a longer lifespan, it’s a better to improve our “healthspan,” the time we can enjoy good health. A new study from Brown University has linked the protein Sirt4 with an extended healthy lifespan in fruit flies, and the find may carry across to humans.

Biologists often concern themselves with preserving cells. However, it is also advantageous to learn how to kill them, without having their contents exploding into neighboring tissue. That's exactly what bioengineers have done by linking a "suicide" enzyme with a light-sensitive molecule.

Researchers have extended the life of female fruit flies by 20 percent by manipulating what the school has called a "cellular time machine." The biologists hope their findings will have implications for human aging and help fight off age-related diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

Normally, taste receptors in the mouth pick up sweetness and tell us to keep eating, but one has been found that does the opposite – for fruit flies, anyway. A pair of neurons in the throat tells the insects when they’ve had enough sugar, which could hopefully help manage sugar cravings in humans.

Researchers added fluorescent molecules to synapses so they could read the minds (after the fact) of fruit flies engaged in complex behavior. The work has implications for efforts to both map and understand the neural pathways within fruit fly brains as well as in human brains.

Machine vision and robotic precision have combined in a new way to further fruit fly research. Scientists at Stanford's Bio-X program have developed a robot that can catch and sort the tiny creatures much faster than a human can, though to the flies themselves it must seem like an alien abduction.

Using a technique in which better cells in the body to be selected at the expense of more damaged ones, researchers at the University of Bern in Switzerland have managed to significantly increase the lifespan of the common fruit fly.

While existing methods of controlling Mediterranean fruit flies include the use of insecticides and sterilization, a new approach uses genetically modifying male fruit flies to produce only male viable offspring.