Keep your swatter in the closet for this CSI. These green beasts may look like nobodys, but in fact they are privy
to high-priority intelligence. Still, they only spill the details to those who can decipher boundless volumes of
code. They are secret agents.
Okay, they’re flies. Fruit flies, specifically, who go by Drosophila melanogaster in inner circles. But don’t let their size fool you: these bugs may have helped scientists learn more about human nature than humans themselves. That’s because in addition to sharing many of their genes with people, fruit flies make far better lab subjects. They don’t eat much, reproduce like mad, and never demand an ethics committee. For those reasons, scientists poke them, prod them, unravel their DNA, and watch their every move for clues about how a body works.
The flies pictured here came from the lab of Steve Kay at the Scripps Research Institute, where scientists are using the flies to help explain circadian rhythms, the biological clocks we all have and that tell us when to sleep or exercise other physiological priorities. Researchers inserted a gene borrowed from fireflies to make the flies glow -- a phenomenon that responds to cycles of light and dark -- as part of an experiment to see how a fly’s internal clock ticks.
Such research may someday help researchers find better treatments for human conditions like insomnia and Seasonal Affective Disorder. To that we say: Buzz on.
To find out more about these neato flies, check out the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Virtual Transgenic Fly Lab.
Photo courtesy Steve Kay at the Scripps Research Institute.
