ScienceDaily (Oct. 12, 2012) — Spots
on the butts of fruit flies are really, really small. But what a researcher and
his graduate student are discovering about them could be gigantic.
Thomas Werner, assistant professor of
biological sciences at Michigan Technological University, and his PhD student,
Komal Kumar Bollepogu Raja, have discovered that three genes that cause cancer
and disease in humans also "paint" the spots on the fly's body. This
discovery could enable researchers to study how those genes work in fruit flies
and apply that knowledge to treating cancer in people.
"The last common ancestor of man and
fruit flies lived about 600 million years ago," says Werner. "All the
genes needed to build a body were already present in that ancestor, and today
we still share virtually all of our body-building genes with fruit flies. This
is why we are able to study human diseases like cancer in fruit flies."
Werner and Raja are interested in how DNA
encodes body forms and patterns in animals. They use color patterns as a model.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
You only need to enter your comment once! Comments will appear once they have been moderated. This is so as to stop the would-be comedian who has been spamming the comments here with inane and often offensive remarks. You know who you are!