Articles tagged Drosophila
(138 results)

Today’s guest post was contributed by Andreas Prokop, of the University of Manchester. Along with research on the cell biology of neurons during development and ageing, he is engaged in many science communication and outreach projects. Follow him on Twitter: @Poppi62 More than a century of intense research with the fruit fly Drosophila has arguably turned…

With 1014 authors, an article by Leung et al. in the May issue of G3 has the largest author list of any paper published in the journal. More than 900 of those authors were undergraduate students when they performed the research. Over several years, students at 63 higher education institutions across the US conducted an…

Male Drosophila fruit flies perform an elaborate ritual when they court a female. The male first turns towards the female, follows her, taps her, vibrates his wings to produce a species-specific song, licks her genitalia, curves his abdomen toward her and, if all goes well, the pair finally copulate. These complex routines may help flies…

Fruit flies suffer from an image problem. Maybe it’s the alliteration in the name, or the association with bananas, but Drosophila have become a go-to target for politicians looking to ridicule wasteful public spending. In February, presidential candidate and US Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) questioned the NIH for spending: “…a million dollars trying to determine…

This year’s Larry Sandler Memorial Award for an outstanding PhD dissertation in Drosophila research was presented to Zhao Zhang. Zhang, pictured receiving the prestigious award from Erika Bach (New York University), delivered the award lecture on the opening night of last week’s 56th Annual Drosophila Research Conference in Chicago, IL, organized by GSA. He carried…

Transposable elements don’t proliferate in genomes at a steady pace; they often arrive in bursts. But models of neutral TE evolution assume transposition occurs at a constant rate. That makes it harder to test, for instance, whether low TE allele frequencies in a population are due to negative selection or just a recent transposition burst.…