Fruit Flies Unravel Brain Mysteries
Title: Fruit Flies Unravel Brain Mysteries
Date: September 9, 2008
http://www.firstscience.com/home/articles/nature/fruit-flies-unravel-brain-mysteries_52219.html
Easton Renwick
October 24, 2008
Before i read this article i had very little knowledge about fruit flies. One things i did indeed know about fruit flies was that they are very annoying, and in reading this article that is what i hoped to find. In this article scientists investigated the question how the genetic system of the fruit fly can help figure out the way humans perceive the world and make choices. The data that was collected for this article was done by scientists through experiments, the experiments were done fairly easy because it is easy to contain flies and there life span can be altered by the temperature.
The main fly used for this research was the Drosophila, is because they have the ability to alter many things in the makeup of it. For instance the can increase the number of enzymes and study what kind of effect it has on the fly. Also flies only have 4 pairs of chromosones compared to the 23 pairs that humans have. This makes it easier for scientist to study flies and learn their behavior because with they fly there is less genetic makeup that a scientist has to go through. The flies eyes is the key to understanding how they see and perceive the world. The fruit flies compound eye contains 760 unit eyes. Scientist consider this to be the most important part in studying how flies perceive their surroundings. Through researching through the sight of the fruit fly. Drosophila flight simulator is ideal for analysing how the brain of the fly is optimised for processing visual information from its environment, researchers can train the fruit fly to follow certain visual patterns, with the help of a punishment such as heat. This research was conducted by Marie McCulloch, Dr Mikko Juusola, and Professor Roger Hardie.
Further questions i have about this topic is that when will scientist be able to tell what exactly causes flies to behave the way that they do, and if indeed they do figure it out, in what manner will they go about it.
