fruit flies

(University of Utah) When a cell's chromosomes lose their ends, the cell usually kills itself to stem the genetic damage.

But University of Utah biologists discovered how those cells can evade suicide and start down the path to cancer.

The new study of fruit flies is the first to show in animals that losing just one telomere -- the end of a chromosome -- can lead to many abnormalities in a cell's chromosomes.

Scientists have made a significant finding that could lead to better drugs for several degenerative diseases including Huntington's disease and Alzheimer's disease.

Compounds that block the activity of a specific enzyme prevented brain injury and greatly improved survival in fruit flies that had the same disease process found in Huntington's disease.

Fruit flies fine-tune their olfactory systems by recalibrating the sensitivity of different odor channels in response to changing concentrations of environmental cues, a new study has shown.

Disable this calibration system, and flies have trouble finding a mate, the researchers have found. The fly nervous system can dampen its response to intense smells to prevent strong signals from overloading the circuits, they report in the July 31 issue of Neuron.

Evidence of physically similar species hidden within plant tissues suggest that diversity of neotropical herbivorous insects may not simply be a function of plant architecture, but may also reflect the great age and area of the neotropics.

At first, fruit flies eat like horses. Hatching inside over-ripe fruit where they were laid, they feed wildly in the sugar-rich environment until nature sends them an offer they can't refuse.

To survive, they must leave the fruit, wander off and burrow into the earth where they avoid food as if it were poison.

Only then can the larvae grow and hatch into flies that will take wing to lay their own eggs.

(Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council) Scientists funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council have found a fast and effective way to investigate important aspects of human aging.

Researchers at the University of Oxford and the Open University have discovered a gene in fruit flies that means flies can now be used to study the effects aging has on DNA.

They demonstrate the value of this model in helping us to understand the aging process.

Humans and fruitflies -- those pesky little buggers that are irresistibly attracted to overripe fruit -- share more than a sweet tooth.

Both rely on the same insulin-regulated molecular pathway to maintain their energy balance when starved for food, reports a team of researchers.

The identification of a new class of photoreceptors in the retina of fruit flies sheds light on the regulation of the pigments of the eye that confer color vision, researchers at New York University's Center for Developmental Genetics report in a new study.

The findings, they write, may also have implications for the regulating of olfactory receptors, which are responsible for the detection of smells, because both types of receptors belong to the same protein family.

The fittest males don't always get the girl, biologists report. Study tackles a paradox in species from fruit flies to humans: If warriors win the spoils, why don't males evolve towards super-aggressiveness?

Female fruit flies sometimes choose males who win fights, sometimes choose males who do not fight, and sometimes choose males for no obvious reason, say biologists.

Scientists have rediscovered a fly living in the mouth of land crabs. One of the more bizarre choices of breeding substrates comes from Drosophila endobranchia.

This species is one out of three known fruit flies that have found a home on (and inside) land-crabs. Although frequently mentioned in biology textbooks, the crab flies have somewhat surprisingly been neglected in active research since their description.

The fly has actually not even been seen since its initial discovery in 1966.