Short Stuff: Fruit Flies, Why?

Have you ever wondered why we do so much scientific testing on fruit flies? Turns out they make better models for humans than you’d think.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark,
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. Jerry's buzzing around out there somewhere.
I'm sorry, uh, and this is short stuff. Like I
think I said, yeah, the seats fly something that if
if you took high school biology, you talked about these
little fellows, the what fly, the CTS fly. I thought

(00:26):
we were talking about fruit flies. Isn't that the CTS fly?
I don't think so. Is that different? Yeah, I'm pretty sure.
I always thought that CTS fly was the same thing
as the fruit fly. Now no, because I think the
tt C fly is that how you say it? Um
gives like passes around dangai fever. Oh well, just never mind, then, everybody,
what we're really talking about is the fruit fly a

(00:50):
k a. The dress off ala. And it's impossible to
read this next word without reading it like like this, Uh,
Melano gangster, But it's not gangster, unfortunately, it's Milano Gaster. Yeah.
Most people call him Josaphila though. Oh I've always heard
droop now, oh man, I don't know now that you

(01:13):
say that. I've never heard it out loud. I've always
seen it in writing. So when you said most people
say it that way, you just lied. So what I
mean is, oh my gosh, yeah, I totally just did.
Thank you for calling me out for that, just in
the lying machine, apparently because I didn't realize that they're
Milano gangsters no matter what. Okay, so we're talking, let's

(01:34):
just call him fruit flies. How about that flies? But
there is a bunch and by the way, t flies
are large biting fly, so there's definitely not these. Um.
Now we have to do a short stuff on those guys.
Thanks Chuck. Literally, uh, probably one eighth of the show
is now misinformation. So, um, fruit flies specifically, how did

(01:57):
you say it? Drosophila That's what I said. It's much
more beautiful than what I said, so I'm gonna go
with that too. You know, most people say Drosophila um.
Those particular kinds of fruit flies, Drosophila melang Melana gaster.
They are um widely used in scientific experiments, and it
turns out it's a lot of people know that we

(02:19):
use fruit flies and experiments. They've actually bestowed a tremendous
amount of information to us humans um through their biology,
through their genetics, through the very the very the very existence.
We owe a great debt to them scientifically because a
lot of them have been asked to sacrifice their lives

(02:40):
in the for the furtherance of human knowledge. Yeah, and
there's a bunch of reasons, which we're gonna get to
kind of here and there in a sec But you
dug up this kind of interesting bit from February v
two rocket full to the brim, well not full to
the brim, but a lot of fruit flies were loaded

(03:02):
up on this thing, traveled sixty seven miles up into
the air, which is technically uh an altitude, which is
one mile into actual space according to NASA. And they
were the very first animals to go into space. Yeah,
and they actually survived that trip um and not one
of like they were the first animal and they were

(03:24):
they were like a test animal to see. Scientists were like, well,
no one's ever been to space. We have no idea
what happens out there. Maybe these things are gonna come
back all mutated and everything. And when they didn't, when
they actually survived the flight and the re entry um,
they said, oh, well, let's start sending more larger animals
up and they did, and eventually we ended up on
humans and that's what we're sending up these days. That's right.

(03:48):
But it was very instructive to see those flies come
back without you know, seven eyeballs or or twice the
size or ten times the size they were. They were fine,
they didn't hulk out. Yeah. And by that yeah, no
purple ripped pants to be found. Um by that time bye.
They had actually been used in biological studies for well

(04:11):
over a decade UM. In the nineteen thirties, in particular,
they basically helped establish the field of modern genetics. UM.
A guy uh named um Morgan Thomas Hunt Morgan basically
showed that inheritance has passed along via chromosomes using a

(04:31):
fruit fly study, and he did it in months rather
than years that his other fellow early geneticists took to
to prove their studies and actually end up winning a
Nobel Prize for it. And in fact, at least five
people have won Nobel Prizes from directly working with fruit flies. Yeah,
I mean, if you want a Nobel prize, not a

(04:52):
bad place to start, that's right, Uh. And the reason why,
or maybe we should take a break and then talk
about some of the reasons why, right, after this. Yes,

(05:21):
all right. The reasons why fruit flies are really great
are multifold. One of the reasons if you're going to
study genetics, what you need to study is generations, and
fruit flies are really quick. They can create a new
generation in about two weeks, so that means you can

(05:41):
study generation after generation in short order. Uh. They are
very easy to breed in the lab. Um, they're small,
they don't put up much of a fussy, easy to
care for. Yeah, they just want a little cornstarch and
sugar soup and they're happy. Yeah little fruit maybe yeah, um, yeah,
you don't even have to give them fruit. That's really

(06:02):
corn Starch and sugar soup is fine with them. But yeah, ultimately,
I'm sure they prefer the real deal, you know. But
if they're being raised in a lab their entire life
and countless generations that they of their lineage before them
have been raised in a lab, they'll take the corn
starch and sugar soup if that's all they can get. Right.
But why, why, my friend, if you're going to study

(06:23):
human genetics, would would you even bother looking at a
fruit fly? Well that's a great question, Chuck, And the
answer to it is that we share a surprising number
of genes with fruit flies. Um. Apparently eight thousand of
our twenty thousand to twenty five thousand genes are analogous
to fruit fly genes. Yeah, so if you study those

(06:46):
genes and fruit flies, you can extrapolate to humans. You know,
what they do, what happens when you poke them with
a whatever, Um, what happens if you shine a light
on them, if you're doing an optogenetic study. Um. That
there's a lot of questions that we've answered through genetics
because of that benefit of having similar genes. And apparently

(07:08):
sev of the genes known to cause diseases in humans
are are are shared between humans and fruit flies too.
It's so cool. Another cool thing you can do if
you want to say, oh, I don't know, Like, what
if you live in the Arctic and you're always or
the greater northern climates of Canada and you're just basically

(07:31):
cold all the time. What is that going to do
to your gene activity in your metabolism. Well, let's put
two thousand fruit flies in a in a chamber and
make it super cold all the time and look at
them and see what happens. You can get a large
population study very very easily because these little fellas are
so tiny. Yeah. They also share, in addition to genes,

(07:52):
a lot of the same biochemical pathways that humans have
to UM. One example I saw is that they don't
actually get Alzheimer's, but they have all of the same
pathways and and brain structures that Alzheimer's um befalls in humans.
So we can study those pathways and try to treat

(08:13):
Alzheimer's just by looking at UM these these pathways and
these brain structures in fruit flies. Yeah. I also thought
it was funny when you look at the downside of
fruit flies. Aside from just some of the genetic components,
the biggest downside, it seems like, is that their fruit
flies and fruit flies are super annoying. They really are

(08:33):
very annoying. Um there apparently what's called cosmopolitan species. So
wherever humans are, they're going to be there too. And
the reason why is apparently because we live in conditions
that they find very suitable, like moderate temperatures that are
fairly stable, and we like fruit too, and sometimes we
leave our fruit out and it gets a little past ripe,

(08:55):
and the fruit flies say thank you, sir or madam
they doff their little top hat, um, click their heels
together with their spats, and they go to town on
that juicy banana, which I guess if you have a
juicy banana you want to throw that now. Yeah, but
did you see that listener mail by the way, about

(09:15):
the banana bread banana. Someone emailed about something you said,
and I said that I think one of the big
reasons too, is because they get really really sweet. Mh
is why you want to use an old banana. But anyway,
the fruit flies love all that stuff. So if you
live near a dumpster, unfortunately for you, which I did

(09:38):
in my apartment in Los Angeles, had a dumpster behind
my apartment, which is where I found my cat Luran,
by the way, it wasn't all that Or if you compost,
God help you. Um it's a great thing to do.
But you're going to be dealing with some fruit flies,
you are. And again, I mean, there's really not a
lot besides annoyance that fruit flies vide humans like. They

(10:01):
don't transfer or transmit communicable diseases and not a disease vector.
And on the on the flip side of that, they've
actually stood in as models for um disease carrying insects,
Like we know a lot about how mosquitoes transmit disease
by studying fruit flies as models. So they basically annoy us.

(10:24):
But they've furthered our, understanding and medicine in countless ways.
And yet we're still like, yeah, but they're annoying, you
know what I mean? Yeah, you know that's so human
it is. But they're not like that rat, the c
fly now dan gay fever spreading mofo uh. And apparently

(10:45):
if you you know, if you do compost like inside
and you have a even if you have a thing
with the lid, they're gonna gather around. You can set
up a little little vinegar jar like a canning jar
with vinegar at the bottom, uh, and then a top
made of plastic wrap with some holes in there, and
you can trap them and even remove them safely. I
think if you want, yeah, just throw them out in

(11:06):
the yard and say, go find a juicy banana because
I don't want it. Although it is true you can
use those for banana bread. I forgot. Yeah, so fruit
flyes ahoy. The next time you see a fruit fly,
don't swat at it, say thank you fruit fly. Your
kind has been very beneficent to my kind and I
appreciate it. That's right and said since Chuck said that's

(11:29):
right and tapped his watch, Short Stuff is out. Stuff
you Should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How
Stuff Works. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to
your favorite shows.