Drosophila Essay

1) Drosophila is a powerful multicellular organism to use as a model system since it has been studied for over a century and is the leading model organism for genetic investigations. Therefore, there is plenty of tools and techniques specifically developed to be used on drosophila. Drosophila on the molecular level is remarkably similar to humans. Additionally, Drosophila has a life cycle of about 10-12 days compared to a human cells that has a lifetime of months, making drosophila a very useful model system. Along with the advantages discussed above, some of the other major advantages of drosophila is that there is no ethical issues while manipulating with the drosophila for scientific investigations, they are very inexpensive, and easy to maintain. With all this, the main argument for using drosophila as a model system for human disease is that drosophila has no ethical issues in using the organism, fast life cycle, and most importantly there are parallels in drosophila genome to humans, providing insightful research. The only limitations in using drosophila is that they have very different anatomy and physiology than humans therefore the effects of

A fly with just the “promoter-Gal4” is known as the driver line. The “UAS-GFP” alone in fly allows us to determine what specific foreign gene is introduced into the fruit fly’s genetic makeup. In this case, the “UAS-GFP” alone in flies allows us to determine that GFP is the incorporated foreign gene into the fruit flies genome, but it is not actively expressed. A fly with just the “ UAS-GFP” in known as the responder line. This allows for the crossing over of both lines of flies to show an expression of a specific gene at a specific tissue in their offspring and this allows to determine the effects of both components in the fruit