Fancy Footwork Helps Flies Cheat Death

jerry submitted, created time 2 months 2 weeks (sciencenow.sciencemag.org)

A study discovered that the fly anticipates the direction of a looming threat and makes split-second movements that better prepare it to take off in the opposite direction. The findings reveal a level of movement planning rarely seen in such a simple organism.

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A natural reprogramming system

sea-maid submitted, created time 2 months 3 weeks (www.nature.com)

In fruit flies--and presumably other pupating insects--specialized cells revert to multipotency as the larva prepares to transform into an adult. We had thought that the differentiated larval cells simply died during this process, and many of them do, but it does seem that some can regain some pluripotency.

The way they figured this out is particularly vivid. By modifying the cells in the larvae's tracheae to glow green, researchers were able to track their destinations and daughter cells.

We already knew that some human cells were able to perform similar feats

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The similarity between human and fly

Sue Wu submitted, created time 8 months 1 day (www.sciencedaily.com)

According to researchers at the Monell Center, fruit flies are more like humans in their responses to many sweet tastes than are almost any other species.

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Homosexuality is not solely genetic! ...at least not in fruit flies.

Darkfrog submitted, created time 11 months 1 week (www.eurekalert.org)

The researchers were examining a particular glutamate regulator gene solely because of the things that it does to synapses and neurotransmitters and created a line of mutant fruit flies in which this gene is inactive. During the study, they noticed that their male altered flies where buzzing around other males just as eagerly as around females. They had turned the flies bisexual. They named the gene "genderblind."

By then, though, they had a pretty good idea of how GB altered the flies' synapses and neural pathways

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Like a Virgin ... Fly

Tracking the evolution of alternatively spliced exons within the Dscam family

m.giddings submitted, created time 1 year 1 month (www.biomedcentral.com)

The Dscam gene in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, contains twenty-four exons, four of which are composed of tandem arrays that each undergo mutually exclusive alternative splicing (4, 6, 9 and 17), potentially generating 38,016 protein isoforms. This degree of transcript diversity has not been found in mammalian homologs of Dscam. The researchers examined the molecular evolution of exons within this gene family to locate the point of divergence for this alternative splicing pattern.

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