Drosophila Labs

With just over 100,000 neurons but incredible genetic tractability, the fruit fly is an important model in neuroscience. About 65% of human disease-associated genes have a homolog in Drosophila melanogaster (Ugur et al., 2016). Like many model organisms, they’re easy to reproduce, cheap, and easy to take care of in a lab. But on top of that, they’ve been studied for more than a century. Drosophila have been used to study everything from learning, memory, vision, sleep, addition, courtship, and aggression.

In these labs, we’ll aim to characterize and manipulate (hello optogenetics!) olfactory and locomotor behavior in transgenic fruit flies, solving a few mysteries along the way.

Lab Protocols