Humanizing Flies
Markstein: We can put genes of any sort in the fly, and in particular what we do in our lab is we put human genes in the fly and that’s called humanizing them.
Humanizing flies? Sounds a bit like a science fiction movie, but it turns out that one of the best ways to study cancer in humans is with the common fruit fly. I’m Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet. First a reminder of what genes are, with a little help from Michelle Markstein, an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.
Markstein: A gene is a set of instructions that tells the cell how to make a protein. Proteins are these molecular machines that give cells the various properties they do. So your brain cells are different than your muscle cells, because they express different genes, which become different proteins that give them different functions.
Michelle and her team are using fruit flies as a living laboratory too study cancer.
Markstein: In our lab we put human genes that cause cancer – called oncogenes, in the fly, and we express them to make mini-tumors. And the reason we do this in the fly is several fold. One is, in our lab in particular we study cancer and STEM cells. And so we put these genes in the STEM cell of the fly to create tumor models. And it’s really hard to do that in a dish in vitro in tissue culture, because STEM cells need to be in what we call a micro-environment. So the fly is like a ready made organ culture system for us. We put human genes in them; they grow these tumors in STEM cells, but in the fly the STEM cells are in the correct micro-environment. And so we’re able to replicate a piece of biology in a fly that you would not be able to replicate in a dish the place where human cells are normally studied.
In a future program, we’ll hear some of the surprising results Michelles’ team has been finding. Pulse of the Planet is made possible in part by Virginia Tech, inventing the future through a hands-on approach to education and research.