No, I'm not crazy - flies are actually amazing! To give them their proper name - Drosophilia melanogaster, they've been used in genetics research for over 100 years. Fruit flies actually carry 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans, so they're ideal for science research. They're also pretty easy to take care of - much easier than rats or fish. The only slight issue is that of course, they fly. Because of this, scientists need to knock them out before they're used - to do this, scientists have a number of options - they can either cool them or knock them out with carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide method is probably the best, partly because it's cheap and also because it knocks them out long enough for the experiment to be carried out. Once the experiment is over, they wake up and are perfectly fine (if not a little dizzy :) ) Currently they're being used across labs worldwide in everything from neurological disease to manipulating genes for future treatments.
No comments:
Post a Comment