![]() ![]() The flies were washed and dried and returned to the museum collection. Lund zoologist Marcus Stensmyr recovered genetic material from the museum flies by soaking them in a solution that breaks open cell membranes to free up large molecules inside. "But the number of generations - about 3,000 - that have elapsed in fly populations since some of these we've sequenced were alive is about the same number of our generations since humans emerged from Africa." "It's not so unusual to get useful DNA from very old specimens of our hominid ancestors or other animals," Pool says. Because a fruit fly lives about 50 days, the new DNA samples - described in a study published today in the journal PLOS Biology - come from some very ancient relatives of the flies buzzing around our fruit bowls these days. But those samples came from modern specimens. That means the genes of fruit flies may have been sequenced, catalogued and described more often than any other animal. ![]() "We've turned to it to learn things about the basic rules of life, what genetic variation looks like in natural populations, how different evolutionary forces shape diversity. "This species has been a key player in basic biological science for well over a century now," says John Pool, UW-Madison professor of genetics. The early fly-finders considered any insects they could get their hands on worth keeping - Fallén's specimens indeed include some that appear to have been enjoying his raisins - but they probably couldn't have conceived of Drosophila's importance to science. The flies are museum specimens collected by naturalists in Europe as early as the first decade of the 19th century and as recently as the 1930s. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Lund University extracted and analyzed DNA from fruit flies housed in museum collections in Lund, Stockholm and Copenhagen. And DNA from Fallén and Zetterstedt's centuries-old curiosities are still revealing new insights into the fly's evolution as it spread alongside people to new parts of the world. Skip forward 200 years, and the humble fruit fly, known better to geneticists as Drosophila melanogaster, is one of the most thoroughly studied animals on the planet. ![]()
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