Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster (Black-bellied Dew-lover) a dipteran (two-winged) insect, is the species of fruit fly that is commonly used in genetic experiments; it is among the most important model organisms. In modern biological literature, it is often simply called Drosophila or (common) fruit fly. Students also nickname it Drozzy.

Behavioral genetics and neuroscience

In 1971 Ron Konopka and Seymour Benzer published a paper titled "Clock mutants of Drosophila melanogaster" in which they described the first mutations that affected an animal's behavior. Wild-type flies show an activity rhythm of with a frequency of about a day (24 hours). They found mutants with faster and slower rhythms as well as broken rhythms - flies that move and rest in random spurts. Work over the next 30 years has shown that these mutations (and others like them) affect a group of genes and their products that comprise a biochemical or molecular clock. This clock is found in a wide range of fly cells, but the clock-bearing cells that control activity are several dozen neurons in the fly's central brain.

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Since then Benzer, his students and many other have used behavioral screens to isolate genes involved in vision, olfaction, audition, learning/memory, courtship, pain and other processes such as longevity.

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