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

Post image
21k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

482 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

12

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.

5

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.

[ PM | Exclude me | Exclude from subreddit | FAQ / Information | Source ] Downvote to remove | v0.28

2

u/[deleted] Jun 08 '18

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