the.com/fruitfly
a two-week-long flying gremlin that taught us almost everything about our own genes.
means A tiny fly of the genus Drosophila that swarms around ripe or rotting fruit, famous as a workhorse organism in genetics labs.
from A plain English compound — fruit plus fly — naming the obvious: the little insects that appear, as if by magic, around bananas left too long on the counter. "Fruit" comes through Old French from Latin fructus ("produce, enjoyment"), and "fly" traces back to Old English flēoge, from a Germanic root tied to flying. The scientific name Drosophila is Greek for "dew-loving" (drosos, "dew" + philos, "loving") — a poetic nod to creatures that haunt moist, fermenting things.
- Genetic twin
- Shares about 60% of human disease genes
- Speed breeders
- New generation roughly every 10 days
- Nobel magnet
- Six Nobel Prizes won studying them
- Drunk flies
- They get tipsy and prefer alcohol
- Space travelers
- First animals sent into space, 1947
drosophila melanogaster — the model organism used in 99% of genetic research since 1910, with a fully sequenced genome
ceratitis capitata — the mediterranean fruit fly, costs california agriculture $376 million annually in damage and control