Diabetic Fruit Flies
January 14, 2014 | Terry Sharrer

Fruit fly on right, genetically altered, has symptoms comparable to type 2 diabetes.
Just about a century ago the “fly room” at Columbia University became the incubator of American genetics. Drosophilia melanogaster was the experimental “animal” for the chromosome theory of inheritance, the first genetic map, and foundation ideas of molecular biology. Researchers at the University of Maryland have now returned to the fruit fly, first to create a knockout strain for insulin utilization, and then, by inserting the human gene GLU74 into the insect genome, discovered that the fly can serve as an experimental model for diabetes in people—pathology and treatment. MORE
Image Credit: Jingnan Liu, UMD, and Hua Zhang and ScienceDaily.com