Drosophila – Making History

Drosophila Making History

Ambience: buzzing fruit flies (drosophila)
In the history of genetics, no species has played a more important role than that of a humble fly. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Markstein: Drosophila are fruit flies. And they are one of the most powerful genetic systems available to scientists today, in part because of their rich history.

Michelle Markstein is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Markstein: So what you’re hearing right now are hundreds and hundreds of fruit flies in a small container that we call an egg chamber. There’s a food source and they can lay eggs. And that sound is the sound of flies that are busy at laying eggs, and they’re busy doing the things that would produce eggs.

You’ve probably all seen drosophila in your kitchen, when you let bananas or some other fruit ripen a little too much. They’re tiny; they fly around. They don’t bit you; they don’t do anything bad.

So, Drosophila first came into the lab about 1910 — the lab of Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. They were attracted to these in part because they were cheap, and you could give them to undergrads to do projects. But it turns out that in his lab, the foundations of modern genetics were established.
For example, that genes are in chromosomes; that you can measure the distance between genes. It was even found that you could mutate what was called hereditary material. Those were experiments with flies before we even know what DNA was. That earned this person Herman Muller the Nobel prize in the 1940s. So there are ground-breaking advances in genetics with fruit flies.

In future programs a look at how the fruit fly is helping us to find new and better treatments for cancer. Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.

Drosophila - Making History

In the history of genetics, no species has played a more important role than a humble fly.
Air Date:02/01/2017
Scientist:
Transcript:

Drosophila Making History

Ambience: buzzing fruit flies (drosophila)
In the history of genetics, no species has played a more important role than that of a humble fly. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Markstein: Drosophila are fruit flies. And they are one of the most powerful genetic systems available to scientists today, in part because of their rich history.

Michelle Markstein is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Markstein: So what you're hearing right now are hundreds and hundreds of fruit flies in a small container that we call an egg chamber. There's a food source and they can lay eggs. And that sound is the sound of flies that are busy at laying eggs, and they're busy doing the things that would produce eggs.

You've probably all seen drosophila in your kitchen, when you let bananas or some other fruit ripen a little too much. They're tiny; they fly around. They don't bit you; they don't do anything bad.

So, Drosophila first came into the lab about 1910 -- the lab of Thomas Hunt Morgan at Columbia University. They were attracted to these in part because they were cheap, and you could give them to undergrads to do projects. But it turns out that in his lab, the foundations of modern genetics were established.
For example, that genes are in chromosomes; that you can measure the distance between genes. It was even found that you could mutate what was called hereditary material. Those were experiments with flies before we even know what DNA was. That earned this person Herman Muller the Nobel prize in the 1940s. So there are ground-breaking advances in genetics with fruit flies.

In future programs a look at how the fruit fly is helping us to find new and better treatments for cancer. Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.