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X-Ray Beams And Fruit Fly 'Flight Simulator' Aid Scientists' View Of Muscle Power

What is the connection between a fly’s aerodynamic skill and human heart function? Using the nation’s most brilliant X-rays, located at the Advanced Photon Source at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory, a cardiac molecular motors expert from the University of Vermont (UVM) and colleagues from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and Caltech performed research to answ...

Master gene controls healing of skin in fruit flies and mammals

University of California, San Diego biologists and their colleagues have discovered that the genetic system controlling the development and repair of insect cuticle--the outer layer of the body surface in insects--also controls these processes in mammalian skin, a finding that could lead to new insights into the healing of wounds and treatment of cancer. The UCSD biologists' study, publish...

Remote control flies? Fly behavior controlled by laser light

Yale University School of Medicine researchers have found a way to exercise a little mind control over fruit flies, making the flies jump, beat their wings, and fly on command by triggering genetic "remote controls" that the scientists designed and installed in the insects' central nervous systems, accordi...

Aircraft Cabin Ventilation Influences The Transmission Of Diseases In-flight

Increasing ventilation within aircraft cabins can reduce the spread of infectious diseases in-flight, suggests a review published in this week's issue of THE LANCET. Mark Gendreau (Lahey Clinic Medical Centre, MA, USA) and colleagues reviewed data from studies looking at the transmission of diseases during commercial air travel. They found that while commercial airlines are a suitable envi...

UI researcher studies deafness in fruit flies, humans

University of Iowa Biological Sciences Professor Daniel F. Eberl and his colleagues at Duke University have uncovered genetic defects leading to deafness in fruit flies that may shed light on deafness in humans. Their research paper, "Myosin VIIA Defects, which Underlie the Usher 1B Syndrome in Humans, Lead to Deafness in Drosophila," is scheduled for publication in the May 10 issue of the journa...

How monarch butterflies are wired for navigation

In their extraordinary annual migration from North America to Mexico, monarch butterflies are known to use the angle of polarized sunlight as a celestial guide to help them keep to a straight and true path southward. But details of their navigational machinery have remained a mystery. Now, researchers, led by Steven Reppert of University of Massachusetts Medical School, Ivo Sauman of the C...

Gap-climbing fruit flies reveal components of goal-driven behaviors

Like humans, other animals are faced with everyday obstacles in their physical environments and must engage appropriate decision-making and motor skills to deal with them. Navigating these obstacles can involve highly complex events in mammals and other vertebrates, but in new work, researchers have employed an ingenious obstacle-based system for studying the control and structure of goal-oriente...

Expanding forests darken the outlook for butterflies, study shows

Changing environmental conditions in the Canadian Rockies are stifling the mating choices of butterflies in the region, say University of Alberta researchers. Smaller and less abundant alpine meadows--largely the result of human activities--are diminishing the alpine butterfly gene pool, creating a pattern that could lead to the butterflies being less able to survive, said Dr. Jens Roland,...

Hormones and growth: The control of body size and developmental growth rate in fruit flies

A pair of research papers published this week report findings that increase our understanding of how an organism's body size is determined and how the speed of its development is controlled. In particular, the work sheds light on the molecular and cellular pathways that act to convey information about a growing organism's size, as well as on pathways that use that information to correctly time cr...

Huntington's cure in flies lays groundwork for broader treatment approaches

Boosting levels of two critical proteins that normally shut down during Huntington's disease, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have cured fruit flies of the genetic, neurodegenerative condition. The study results,...

Flies on speed offer insight into the roles of dopamine in sleep and arousal

Methamphetamine, the drug of choice for long-distance truckers and college students pulling all-nighters, appears to do a similar trick for fruit flies, too. This finding is one of several in a new study that demonstrates a critical role for the neurotransmitter dopamine in the modulation of sleep, wake, and arousal states. The work is reported by Dr. Ralph Greenspan and colleagues at The...

Female butterflies go for sparkle -- not size -- when choosing to mate

Size doesn't matter, at least not the size of the eyespots on a male butterfly's wings when female butterflies consider potential mates. The research, to be published onli...

Divergent mating systems and parental conflict as a barrier to hybridization in flowering plants

Sexual reproduction can be thought of as a cooperative process in which two individuals come together to produce a new individual. It can also be viewed as a process in which two parties with differing interests, investment, and background interact to produce a new individual. From the former perspective, parental interests are unified (both wish to produce vigorous offspring), while the latter s...

Researchers find gland that tells fruit flies when to stop growing

Many baffled parents have wondered whether their teenagers would ever stop growing. The answer is obvious, but researchers have never really quite understood just how an organism determines when it has reached its optimal size and growth should cease. Now University of Washington biologists studying the physiology of Drosophila melanogaster, the common fruit fly, have discovered an organ t...

Past experience of pheromones induces dominant courtship behavior in fruit flies

By investigating the interplay between pheromone signaling and behavior in fruit flies, researchers have begun to understand how an adult fly's earlier experience as a young individual can influence its behavior towards other flies as an adult. In particular, the researchers found that pheromone signals in the context of experience with adult flies can influence how young flies will behave once t...

Sperm trading can resolve hermaphrodite mating conflicts

By directly manipulating mating performance in a tropical sea slug, Chelidonura hirundinina, researchers of the University of Tbingen have now shed light on the bizarre reproductive conflicts encountered by hermaphroditic animals. In some hermaphroditic species, such as C. hirundinina, mating partners may insist on copulating as a "male," "female," or both, resulting in unique biological conflict...

How Fruitflies Know It's Time for Lunch

To control what you eat and when, your nervous system must coordinate a laundry list of signals: internal signals contain information about energy level, food preferences, and metabolic need, while external signals relay information about the quality of available food, determined by its smell and taste. Scientists studying the fruitfly Drosophila have traced the path of olfactory signals b...

A resetting signal keeps circadian rhythm on track in Drosophila fruit flies

A Brandeis University study published this week in Nature shows for the first time that a molecular signal maintains coherence among brain clock cells that regulate daily activity of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies). The two key groups of neurons control morning and evening activity and are maintained in synch even when the flies are plunged into darkness for extended periods of time. <...

UCSD study finds anthrax toxins also harmful to fruit flies

Deadly and damaging toxins that allow anthrax to cause disease and death in mammals have similar toxic effects in fruit flies, according to a study conducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego. Their findings, which appear this week in an early online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that fruit flies can be used to study the...

Hot-spring bacteria flip a metabolic switch

Scientists at the Carnegie Institution's Department of Plant Biology have found that photosynthetic bacteria living in scalding Yellowstone hot springs have two radically different metabolic identities. As the sun goes down, these cells quit their day job of photosynthesis and unexpectedly begin to fix nitrogen, converting nitrogen gas (N2) into compounds that are useful for cell growth. T...

Animal models show that anabolic steroids flip the adolescent brain's switch for aggression

Anabolic steroids not only make teens more aggressive, but may keep them that way into young adulthood. The effect ultimately wears off but there may be other, lasting consequences for the developing brain. These findings, published in February's Behavioral Neuroscience, also showed that aggression rose and fell in synch with neurotransmitter levels in the brain's aggression control region. B...

Scientist uses dragonflies to better understand flight

If mastering flight is your goal, you can't do better than to emulate a dragonfly. With four wings instead of the standard two and an unusual pitching stroke that allows the bug to hover and even shift into reverse, the slender, elegant insect is a marvel of engineering. Z. Jane Wang, professor of theoretical and applied mechanics at Cornell University, presented her research on flying sys...

Butterflies lose body fat during metamorphosis

A group of scientists from Oregon have discovered that butterflies experience a great loss in body fat during metamorphosis. The details of their findings appear in the March issue of the Journal of Lipid Research, an American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology journal. "The transformation of a caterpillar to a butterfly is one on nature's great mysteries," says William E. Con...

New gene reduces retinal degeneration in fruit flies

Johns Hopkins researchers have discovered a gene in fruit flies that helps certain specialized neurons respond more quickly to bright light. The study, published in the April 4 issue of Current Biology, also has implications for understanding sensory perception in mammals. In teasing apart the molecular interactions and physiology underlying light perception, the researchers studied a gene...

Evolutionary shifts in olfactory sensitivities in fruit flies

How do an animal's senses change as it evolves to occupy a new ecological niche? By comparing the olfactory system of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, which feeds from multiple fruit types, with that of its sibling species D. sechellia, a specialist particularly drawn to a single fruit type, researchers have demonstrated how evolution can act on several different levels of a sensory system...

More evidence mammals, fruit flies share make-up on function of biological clocks

A study by researchers at New York University and the University of London offers additional evidence that mammals and fruit flies share a common genetic makeup that determines the function of their internal biological clocks. The research team consisted of post-doctoral researcher Ben Collins, Esteban Mazzoni, a graduate student, and Assistant Professor Justin Blau of NYU's Department of...

Researchers identify genes in fruitflies that may shed light on human cancer spread

By searching through all the genes in the fruitfly genome, Johns Hopkins scientists have identified those required for a certain type of cell migration and simultaneously captured a global view of all the genes turned on when cells are on the move. The study, to be published April 3 in Developmental Cell, has implications for understanding cell migration and perhaps controlling cancer cel...

Flick of a protein switches immune response

A single protein can turn on and off a key component of the immune system by changing partners in an elegant genomic dance, said researchers at the University of Southern California and Harvard Medical School. Because autoimmune diseases ?such as arthritis, allergies and dozens of other illnesses ?begin when the body's defenses respond at the wrong time or place, the on-off mechanism for...

Sticky surfaces turn slippery with the flip of a molecular light switch

Changing a surface from sticky to slippery could now be as easy as flipping a molecular light switch. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have created an "optically switchable" material that alters its surface characteristics when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light. The new material, which is described in the June 19 issue of the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition, could h...

Light guides flight of migratory birds

Songbirds use multiple sources of directional cues to guide their seasonal migrations, including the Sun, star patterns, the earth's magnetic field, and sky polarized light patterns. To avoid navigational errors as cue availability changes with time of day and weather conditions, these "compass" systems must be calibrated to a common reference. Experiments over the last 30 years have failed to re...

Flick of whiskers helps tease out brain's 'shadow' signaling system

By blowing gentle puffs of air onto a mouse's whiskers and watching how its brain reacts, scientists are discovering that a long-overlooked signaling system in the brain is crucial to our everyday activity. The work is the latest in a growing body of evidence that star-shaped brain cells known as astrocytes aren't simply support cells but are stars of the brain in their own right, say rese...

Coming soon: 3-D imaging that flies 'through' and 'around' cancer

Stanford University researchers demonstrated for the first time the ability to create 3-D positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) images for "fly-through" and "fly-around viewing" of cancer in the lungs and colon, according to a study in the July issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine. This powerful ability to meld functional data with accurate anatomical information...

Where have all the butterflies gone?

Cold, wet conditions early in the year mean that 2006 is shaping up as the worst year for California's butterflies in almost four decades, according to Art Shapiro, professor of evolution and ecology at UC Davis. That's a turnaround from last spring, when millions of painted lady butterflies migrated through the Central Valley. But other species have seen steep declines in recent years and...

Serotonin, acting in a specific brain region, promotes sleep in fruit flies

Researchers have found that the neurotransmitter serotonin, known to affect many behaviors, also appears to promote lasting, quality sleep in an animal model for understanding how sleep is regulated. While central to the lives of most animals, the proper regulation sleep remains a largely enigmatic process. The findings are reported by Quan Yuan, William Joiner, and Amita Sehgal at the Un...

Tweedle coat fashions stocky flies

University of California, San Diego biologists have discovered that disruptions in genes they call Tweedles make fruit flies short and stout like Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Alice in Wonderland. They report in this week's issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that a defective TweedleD protein in the outer coat of fly larvae makes them appear compressed....

Psst! Coffee drinkers: Fruit flies have something to tell you about caffeine

In their hunt for genes and proteins that explain how animals discern bitter from sweet, a team of Johns Hopkins researchers began by testing whether mutant fruit flies prefer eating sugar over sugar laced with caffeine. Using a simple behavioral test, the researchers discovered that a single protein missing from the fly-equivalent of our taste buds caused them to ignore caffeine's taste and con...

Fighting like a girl or boy determined by gene in fruit flies

Fighting like a girl or fighting like a boy is hardwired into fruit fly neurons, according to a study in the Nov. 19 Nature Neuroscience advance online publication by a research team from Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna. The results confirm that a gene known as "fruitless" is a key factor underlying sexual differences in behavior. The findings mark a mile...

For crickets, parasitic flies can stop the music

Love hurts ?really bad, for some unlucky crickets, anyway. Now, University of Florida zoologists have found that the d...

First biomarker for human sleepiness identified in fruit flies

Scientists have identified the first biochemical marker linked to sleep loss, an enzyme in saliva known as amylase, which increases in activity when sleep deprivation is prolonged. Researchers hope to make amylase the first of a panel of biomarkers that will aid diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders and may one day help assess the risk of falling asleep at the wheel of a car or in oth...

Some butterflies travel farther, reproduce faster

Researchers have uncovered physiological differences among female Glanville fritillary butterflies that allows some to move away from their birth place and establish new colonies. These venturesome butterflies are stronger fliers and reproduce more quickly compared to their less mobile female relatives. The study is a window to how genetic differences influence behavior and how the environ...