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Hi, this is Tony Ip,
professor of molecular medicine
at the University of Massachusetts Medical School.
In this talk I will discuss with you
about intestinal stem cell-mediated repair in drosophila.
The human gastrointestinal tract—
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or GI tract—is a very complex organ.
It's often referred to as "organs within organ."
Each of those individual organs have their own stem cells
to mediate tissue homeostasis and repair.
The human GI tract is particularly suitable
to study tissue regeneration
because many, many cells are shed everyday,
and the stem cells are required to go through many divisions
to repair and replenish all the lost cells.
The right-hand side of the slide
is the GI tract of the model organism,
Drosophila melanogaster,
the common fruit fly.
The size of the GI tract of common fruit flies
is only 2 cm long.
So it's a simple organism that can be used to study
many aspects of GI biology.
This is the life cycle of drosophila.
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The whole takes about 7 to 14 days to complete.
The adults mate and lay embryos.
The embryo takes about 24 hours to hatch as 1st instar larvae.
The larvae will molt 2 times to become 3rd instar larvae
and then turn into pupae to go through metamorphosis
and hatch after about 7 days to become adult flies again.
One reason we use drosophila as a model
