THE NEXT TIME you take a rolled up magazine to the pesky fly hovering over your over-ripe fruit platter at a beach barbecue this summer, pause. Appearances are deceptive. Farmers and fruit stall holders might loath the bug-eyed fly for its aggressive eating habits, but it is, in fact, one the most valuable organisms in biological research.
To geneticists, the fruit fly, or drosophila to give its scientific name, is strikingly similar to human beings, despite its six legs and two wings. Due to its interesting mutations and the speed of its lifecycle, the fruit fly that has long been the focus of research, providing scientists with important insights into human biology.
'More than 60 per cent of human disease genes are found in the fruit fly genome, including genes that cause Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntingdon's disease, and various cancer-causing genes,' said Dr Edwin Chan Ho-yin, assistant professor of biochemistry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK).
Drosophila, which means 'dew-lover', also behaves in similar ways to humans. It falls over if it has too much alcohol (although it has been proven to be able to survive on a diet of alcohol fumes) and naps in the afternoons if it skips on sleep. Geneticists have exploited it to research alcoholism and insomnia.
Chan has been a fruit fly aficionado since his undergraduate days at CUHK more than ten years ago, and his enthusiasm helped create the 'Fruit Fly - Drosophila' exhibition currently running in the Science News Centre at the Hong Kong Science Museum.
He organised the display - including a case of fruit flies to be observed under the microscope - with the help of 10 biochemistry and biotechnology students from the CUHK Laboratory of Drosophila Research, a lab established in 2002 to research degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.