What is a "drosophila"?
I remember being in about 2nd year university, wandering the halls of our biology building and browsing the many conference posters put up by professors and their grad students and research associates. The posters described an exciting and diverse array of ground-breaking research programs but one thing stood out among many of the genetics projects: The word drosophila.
Drosophila are simply fruit flies; The kind you find hovering about your bananas in the kitchen or hanging around the mouths of wine bottles left open too long in the summer. For a number of reasons, they have become a staple of genetic research, in use since Thomas Morgan worked with them in the early 1900s, during an active time in the discovery of genes, and found supporting evidence for Mendel's chromosome theory and sex-linked inheritance.
The species most commonly used in genetic research is Drosophila melanogaster. Harvard maintains a Drosophila Gene Index through the Computational Biology and Functional Genomics Laboratory, that attempts to compile and coordinate data from laboratories across the world and as a resource for gene sequence comparisons.
Fruit flies aren't the only flies scientists have found useful in genetic research. In more recent history, fireflies have also played a huge role in gene discovery and genomics.
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