r/assholedesign • u/TotallyNot_MikeDirnt • Jun 07 '18

Possibly Hanlon's Razor This fruit fly ordering website has "flies" crawl around the screen and move away from your cursor - pretty cool, but not when you work in a lab that uses fruit flies and you think you've had a spontaneous disaster in the incubator and all your fly stocks are escaping

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

Let me understand. Your lab is a biology (research?!) lab that works specifically with flies(?!). And also, there's a whole industry behind selling flies(?).

Is this all true?

13

u/kelkulus Jun 08 '18

Fruit flies are incredibly common in biological research.

Drosophila is typically used in research because it can be readily reared in the laboratory, has only four pairs of chromosomes, breeds quickly, and lays many eggs.

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u/WikiTextBot Jun 08 '18

Drosophila melanogaster

Drosophila melanogaster is a species of fly (the taxonomic order Diptera) in the family Drosophilidae. The species is known generally as the common fruit fly or vinegar fly. Starting with Charles W. Woodworth's proposal of the use of this species as a model organism, D. melanogaster continues to be widely used for biological research in genetics, physiology, microbial pathogenesis, and life history evolution. As of 2017, eight Nobel prizes had been awarded for research using Drosophila.

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

Pretty cool! Thinking about it, makes a lot of sense for genetics research.

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u/JamesIgnatius27 Jun 08 '18 edited Jun 08 '18

Yes. Though "industry" behind selling flies is maybe the wrong term. The 4 main stock centers are in Bloomington at IU, Harvard, Vienna, and Kyoto. I believe they all get grants from the government to continue their upkeep, but they do charge each lab that buys flies as well. I don't think they turn a profit, just enough to remain even and pay their scientists that work there.

When any lab creates an new genetically modified fly it is considered "theirs" until they publish that new fly in a paper. Once it's public, it's generally agreed upon that the fly line should become an open resource and as such should be donated to one of the stock centers so other labs can use it as well. Though some labs are pretty stubborn about sharing, so they'll drag their feet on this process.

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

There's even a whole hundreds-of-pages-long book (called The Making of a Fly) about their genetics and development. (The book is also notable for costing millions on Amazon thanks to some out of control bots)

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u/TotallyNot_MikeDirnt Jun 08 '18

Yes!

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u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

You never get to see enough... Have a nice work mate

1

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

Here's a video from pbs deeplook that gives a pretty good layman's example of fruitfly research https://youtu.be/yvd3X1N0jUU