All about FRUIT FLIES - Our Model - The Nobel Prize Winners!

[Lydia (Lydia Mathew)]

FRUIT FLIES!!

Ever heard of it?
Most of us must have heard of it.

What if we ask a layman, what is a fruit fly?
Or what if we ask a watchman or a gardener, they might be not familiar with a fruit fly. So how will you explain or tell a person what a fruit fly is?

There is a fly which comes into our kitchen if they get to smell some fruits…
They get attracted to the rotten smell of fruits as well
These small flies are the fruit flies that we are going to talk about.

A great easy introduction from The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/07/fruit-fly-fascination-nobel-prizes-genetics:
Drosophila share 60 per cent of human DNA, making them perfect for research that has led to vital strides in treating cancer, autism, diabetes and many other ills. Now scientists in the field have won yet another Nobel.

Drosophila melanogaster a Nobel prize winner!! An award winner…
Ever thought that these small fruit flies that roam nearby the bananas and other fruits are Nobel prize winners??!!
Amazing…right?

Drosophila melanogaster is the species of fruit fly that we are focusing on here in this wiki.
Why D. melanogaster?
Starting with Charles W. Woodworth’s proposal of the use of this species as a model organism, D. melanogaster continues to be widely used for biological research in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis, and life history evolution. As of 2017, Six Nobel prizes had been awarded for research.
D. melanogaster is typically used in research owing to its rapid life cycle, relatively simple genetics with only four pairs of chromosomes, and large number of offspring per generation.

Different topics that we are going to address are:

• Objective
• Trapping
• Circadian rhythm
• Standard media
• Homemade media preparation
• Identification

Links to each topic having detailed information would be put up.
A short introduction to each topic will be given here.

OBJECTIVE:
Comparison of the standard D. melanogaster (CsBz) with the native D. melanogaster for providing evolutionary evidences.
What is CsBz?
What are native D. melanogaster flies?
What type of comparison?
How do we provide evolutionary evidences using these fruit flies or the specific D. melanogaster flies?
For answers to these questions…visit the link below

What's the whole point of working with fruit flies? Objective & Hypothesis

We have 2 different strains of fruit flies The whole work is about these 2 strains of flies. The lab bred strain (culture) which is the standard and the other being the native strain…i.e. from the environment. STANDARD CULTURE OF FLIES: There is a story of these so called standard flies. Seymour Benzer is an American physicist, molecular biologist and behavioral geneticist. [image] One of the standard flies of species Drosophila melanogaster, Canton special Benzer(CsBz) type isolated by S…

TRAPPING
The first and the foremost step is trapping.
Trapping fruit flies…
Is it possible to trap fruit flies?
How do we trap fruit flies?
What are the requirements for trapping fruit flies?
What are the different baits used for trapping flies?
Why are we trapping flies?

Answers by @Shalu

Abduction of 6 time nobel prize winner!

To have fruitfly as a model organism for any research purpose, first what we need is – Fruitfly. Trapping fruitflies is as simple as their flying off from the trap. This whole wide world is a trap,with just a suitable bait away from trapping : For trapping fruitflies too, we can use different baits. But, wait how do we know which bait should be used. So as per name signify, anything with a strong fruity smell can be used as bait like Banana (Banana peel or banana slices), mango, …

Why fruit fly as a model organism?

Life Cycle

CIRCADIAN RHYTHM
A circadian rhythm is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep-wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any biological process that displays an endogenous, entrainable oscillation of about 24 hours. These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been widely observed in plants, animals, fungi, and cyanobacteria.
So circadian rhythm studies were done in fruit flies too.
The latest nobel prize was given for the work in circadian rhythm of fruit flies.
Data of our observations along with some graphs are uploaded, will get more evidences of our work done.
More information by our CUBist @drishtantmkawale

Got Kitchen Flies? Got Nobel-Prize! - A study of the Circadian Rhythm of the Fruit flies

[center]CIRCADIAN RHYTHM STUDIES IN FRUIT FLIES[/center] In Latin, the word Circadian (Circa-about, Dies-day) means about day. It is a biological process which occurs in every living organism and regulates the sleep-wake cycle of the organism. The Circadian rhythm (also known as your sleep/wake cycle or body clock) is a natural, internal system that is designed to regulate feelings of sleepiness and wakefulness over a 24-hour period. This complex timekeeper is controlled by an area of the brai…

STANDARD MEDIA
Cornmeal agar media is the standard media that is used for culturing fruit flies.
Flies are cultured and maintained in small culture bottles or vials having this standard media.
More information on how this media is prepared, what are the ingredients, significance of these ingredients….etc is given in the link below.

Fruit flies' EATING LIFESTYLE in the environment and the lab

[center]Basic need of a human being is FOOD[/center] [center]What all are important in food?[/center][center]OR[/center][center]What are the important components in food?[/center] [image] By this picture we get to know the important components of our daily diet or food! What does these fruit flies require? How do we come to know, what these fruit flies feed on in the environment? [image] By looking at the above picture, we will get an idea what do these fruit flies require… The place or …

HOMEMADE MEDIA PREPARATION

What is this new type of media other than the standard one?
For achieving our long term objectives,
Media preparation is a very important step which helps in maintaining and culturing fruit flies.
So, media preparation was a new challenge that we took up during lockdown.
As we had lost all our lab fruit fly cultures, we thought of making homemade media, which when achieved, can continue with the fruit fly culturing.
Some of us took initiative in trying out to make different homemade media and to find out which home made
So we started looking for alternatives of the standard media.
We need to simulate the same condition of our standard media in our so called “homemade media” and then get reproducible results as we used to get in our standard media.
Details by our CUBist @saswathy679

Newly developed home made media for fruit flies

To address my research question, I need to first trap fruit flies and make single lines by catching gravid females and identify Native Drosophila melanogaster amongst the native fruit flies from the environment! Following are my research objectives Immediate objective  To make homemade media for culturing Native Fruit flies.  To create multiple Single Line culture of Native fruit flies by keeping a bait near kitchen garbage using tomato slice/banana peel and catching gravid females and cr…

IDENTIFICATION
What is this identification all about?
How do we know that the fly that we have trapped is a fruit fly?
Or how do we know it’s an insect?
As we are interested in fruit fly species of Drosophila melanogaster…
How do we know it’s a Drosophilidae fly?
Is it a Drosophila?
There are diagnostic or characteristic features for each of them.
Detailed information by our CUBist @yash_sheregare

Classification and Identification of 6 time Nobel Prize Winners - Drosophila melanogaster!

Identification and Classification can be simply put to say as something that helps us put living organisms into similar or different groups. [size=5 ]Let’s take a simple yet classic example[/size] Just as how Book Libraries have various sections like Science Fiction, Non-Fiction, Comedy, Economics, and so on. Imagine a Book Library where all Different Books are kept together in shelfs. How Difficult would it to Find your Harry Potter book series amongst all the 1000 books in a SINGLE shelf?! […

We have made this whole wiki post and the other wiki posts with the help of some our CUBists…
Links to each topic is put up after a small description of each topic…
@yash_sheregare @drishtantmkawale @Shalu @saswathy679
COMING UP WITH MORE DETAILED INFORMATION!!