A small fly species widely used as a model organism in genetics, neuroscience, and developmental biology research.
Caltech neuroscientists traced male fruit flies' threat displays to four major neurons downstream of a cluster of five to seven cells per brain hemisphere. Activating the neurons in pairs reproduced the display's wing and leg movements.
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Fruit flies hold a goal heading in two coupled neuron groups and write it in by lifting inhibition from one of them, a study in Nature reports. It is a real circuit for the gate that working-memory models add by hand, though the switch is shown so far by a model and by well-timed inhibition.
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Rutgers lab tests found a yeast left by common fruit flies repels the spotted-wing drosophila and cuts its egg-laying. It gives blueberry growers a lead on a control that is not an insecticide, though field trials have not yet been run.
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Two decades after Janelia proposed the project, the adult fly connectome is finished. The 1,000-fold efficiency gain credited with making it possible is measured against the institute's own 2008 forecast.
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University of Geneva researchers find fruit-fly clock neurons inhibit dopamine relay cells on a 24-hour rhythm to gate daytime wakefulness. That puts the step where time of day becomes alertness in a middle layer of cells, so far shown only in flies.
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Baylor researchers tied reduced BRSK1 function to a neurodevelopmental disorder in 10 people from seven families after an AI tool flagged the gene. The variant was already in sequencing data that standard analysis had left unsolved, so the gain came from reading that data again, and fruit-fly experiments supplied the functional evidence.
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A modulator credited with both raising and lowering aggression in flies can now be probed one cell type at a time, some types as small as a pair of neurons, moving the story from chemical to cellular resolution.
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A Penn State team pulled native RNA polymerase II complexes out of fruit fly embryos and found some missing two of the canonical 12 subunits. The purified picture was tidier than the cell.
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