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Hello, my name is Ethan Bier, and
today I'd like to tell you a little bit
about how fruit flies can be used to
study the mechanisms of human disease.
I refer to this often as cross-genomic
analysis of human disease genes,
that is using model organisms
like fruit flies to understand
the mechanism of human
disease gene action.
Now you might on the surface think how on
earth could you possibly use a fruit fly
which looks so very different from
a human, to study a process which seems so
intrinsically human, like human disease?
I'd like first to give a little bit of
background about how we came to this point
of thinking that this is something one
can do, and then give you some examples
of highlights of what is going to be talks
given by other people in this series
on this topic and some examples
that have come from my own lab.
But first I'd just like to give you
a little bit of the background again,
in terms of why we thought that it might
be possible to use fruit flies to study
the mechanism of human
disease gene action.
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What you're looking at here is a fruit
fly embryo about half the way through
its development, and what you have here
on the left is the nose of the embryo,
then it wraps around a little
like a horseshoe to the tail,
to that tail domain that's in yellow.
And what you see are all these stripe
patterns of genes that start from
the yellow in the tail, go all the way
through the red and the blue and
the orange, green and
purple and blue to the nose.
These genes are genes that
control the identity of
different positions within the body of
the fruit fly, they're called Hox genes.
One of the very interesting things about
Hox genes is that they've been very
highly conserved in their function
during the course of evolution.
