Drosophila melanogaster is a powerful model organism for investigation of development and disease. Research using Drosophila has uncovered many conserved signaling pathways essential for growth and differentiation. Drosophila is increasingly being used to model a wide variety of human diseases, including diabetes, mitochondrial, neural and muscular diseases. 65% of human genes are conserved in Drosophila, and loss-of-function alleles have currently been generated for ~60% of genes. The relatively simpler genome with less redundancy allows for simple and powerful genetic analyses. Importantly, major organs such as eyes, heart, intestine and CNS have a high level of developmental conservation, allowing analysis of many human diseases in the simple fly system.
These strengths of Drosophila are enhanced by an unparalleled collection of community-established resources facilities the analysis of variants implicated in human disease including Drosophila stock centers, molecular stock centers, and the pioneering bioinformatics resources.
These short generation time (~10 days), small size, and the unparalleled tools and community resources available for sophisticated genetic analysis of mutant phenotypes in specific tissues.
EXPERT PANEL
Aaron Johnson, PhD
Assistant Professor of Developmental Biology
- Email: anjohnson@nospam.wustl.edu
Fly expert
TOOLS
Transgenic RNAi lines are available for all genes, allowing rapid and efficient analysis of loss of function phenotypes. CRISPR/Cas9 is highly efficient and cost effective way of generating disease variants. cDNA libraries for annotated ORFs in Gateway and loxP- containing vectors are readily available at the Drosophila Genomics Resource Center (DGRC), as well as a variety of vectors for CRISPR based transgenesis. Many tissue and cell type markers are available through the community and can aid in the sophisticated analysis of mutant phenotypes.