Fruit flies poised to take on world

Thursday 8 Nov 0847: It may be small, but the humble fruit fly is the undisputed king of the laboratory. You can listen to this edition of the BBC Radio 4 Today programme until next Wednesday, and hear my colleague Chris Gunter tell the world about an analysis of ten newly sequenced Drosophila (fruit fly) genomes published in Nature this week.

You can see a special Nature web focus here, in which Chris and her editor colleagues write that since its first use as a model organism 100 years ago, "Drosophila is one the most Internet-savvy laboratory organisms, with extensive databases devoted to genetics, genomics, taxonomy, breeding and mail ordering. Several Nobel Prizes have been based in part or in total on work in flies. Flies have even been sent on the space shuttle to study immune system function." To accompany publication of the new analysis, the web focus contains articles by scientists on "the past, present and future of Drosophila in many diverse areas of biology — from physiology and cell biology to neural circuits and gene expression. Size doesn't matter: these tiny fruit flies are once again poised to take on the world." From this web focus page, you can also listen to Nature's free podcast on the genome work, and access other scientific work, websites and resources.