( the amount of insulin preparing the b...)Diabetes research takes wing thanks to long-lived fruit fly

Like JNK, the insulin receptor is also involved in determining life span. Caloric restriction ?limiting the calories an organism ingests ?generally increases lifespan in organisms ranging from worms to flies, and maybe humans. Somehow, JNK and the insulin receptor together seem to work in tandem to affect life span.

"We're learning that an organism's life span may not be limited by design," said Bohmann. "It was once thought that people and other organisms could simply live only a certain number of years and that's it. Instead, our genes play a crucial role in determining and adjusting how long we live. Can we control this process more fully? Perhaps it's possible to re-set the body's aging clock and maybe make someone live longer."

It was Bohmann's questions about cancer-causing genes 20 years ago that led him to focus on JNK, a signaling system that plays a role not only in cancer but in many normal body processes. For several years he has worked with Jasper, using fruit flies to try to unravel the molecular signals that enable cancer cells to grow. Jasper earned his doctoral degree under Bohmann's guidance in 2002 and is now an assistant professor of Biology.

Bohmann initially studied cancer in human cells, then switched to studying fruit flies because he felt that making findings important to human health would happen more rapidly using flies, then transferring the findings to people. He notes that the same molecular signals that control how cells divide in fruit flies control how cells divide in people.

"We continue to be amazed at how similar a fruit fly is to a person," says Bohmann. "We can accomplish the same thing in fruit flies that we would only be able to do with a lot more money, taking a lot longer, in other ways. And many of these experiment
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Source:University of Rochester Medical Center