Question: Which useful genetic techniques do fruit flies have and how do they help with your research?

Mariam Orme answered on 16 Jun 2010:

That’s a very good question, but not so easy for me to answer!

There are lots of great things we can do with flies. One is manipulating their genes. One of the best ways to understand what a gene normally does is to take it away and see what happens – like if you were trying to understand how all the bits of a car work, if you removed some of the wiring and then found that the windscreen wipers don’t work anymore, you’d know that bit of wiring was normally used for making the windscreen wipers work. So anyway, in flies there are ways of easily taking genes away or changing them, to help us understand their function.

Another great thing about flies is that we can make ‘clones’, which is probably not what you think it means – I’m not talking about making an army of cloned flies! What I mean by making clones is that we can force just some of the cells in a fly to have a particular mutation, or to have more than the normal amount of a particular protein. This can be very useful because some mutations are lethal to the whole organism – in other words, some genes are so important that if you take them away or change them, the fly won’t develop in the first place, so you can’t learn much about what the gene does. But by mutating it in just some of the cells, you still get a fly and can study the gene’s function.

Those are just a couple of examples of what we can do with flies, and I’m afraid it was a bit of a complicated answer… I hope it made some sense to you!