The fruit fly

Like I wrote yesterday, I usually play tennis Tuesday night in Schlieren (no big deal). Last time my opponent brought bananas with him because they were rotting in his start-up office nearby which attracted fruit flies. “Those little bastards”, he said. Almost everybody thinks fruit flies are bastards, except my cousin and thousands of other researchers. My cousin has recently published a paper in the journal Nature (not too bad, I would say, almost as good as 60pages for new journalism or whatever you call it what we are doing here) on the visual representations in a region of the fruit fly brain thought to be important for visual learning.

What he actually does is glueing the flies’ cut open head to a thin film while the insects maintain the freedom to walk and move their wings. He then peers with a microscope into the flies’ brains where he detects genetically encoded proteins that light up when a nerve cell fires. What he wants to know is how neurons deep in the flies’ brains that tune in to basic visual features help them not to hit the next banana (or whatever obstacle is in their way). As fruit flies are not that different from bigger animals like us (they are thrown on earth, eat, shit, reproduce themselves, and die) this gets us closer to the understanding of how neurons allow humans (and other bigger animals) to navigate in their environment.

Fruit flies are not only copies of us in other dimensions, as I’ve learnt from Michael Dickinson who featured in a New York Times article on fruit flies. In some ways they are more sophisticated than we are: “We don’t fly. We don’t have a compound eye. I don’t think we process sensory information the same way. The muscles that they use are just incredibly much more sophisticated and interesting than the muscles we use.”, Dickinson said. “They even can taste with their wings.”

Try to do this, stupid mankind.

Photo credit: Igor Siwanowicz, Johannes Seelig and Vivek Jayaraman)