FLY

Common name: fruit fly

Scientific name: Drosophila melanogaster

The fruit fly came into its own as a laboratory model when scientists in the early twentieth century discovered Drosophila was easy to keep, feed and breed, and by the 1920s fruit flies were the subject of extensive experiments in heredity in the labs of Nobel Prize-winner T. H. Morgan and elsewhere. As its popularity as a model increased, data on all aspects of fly biology, from molecular genetics to learned behaviors, burgeoned. The discovery of homeotic genes in the fly, which determine segment identity and which were found to be conserved in animals from worms to humans, made Drosophila a favorite of developmental biologists as well.

Drosophila Labs