Drosophila Hangs from Robot’s Suction Tube

This year marks the centennial of a seminal book in the history of genetics: The Mechanism of Mendelian Heredity, by Morgan, Sturtevant, Bridges and Muller—the famous “fly group” at Columbia University. Today, the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogasgter, remains a “workhorse” of genetics research, which among other things means that geneticists spend a good deal of time in the tedium of observing and manipulating these insects. To make this work more efficient, engineers at Stanford University have developed a robotic solution—as quoted: “a robot that can visually inspect awake flies and, even better, carry out behavioral experiments that were impossible with anesthetized flies.” MORE

Image Credit: L.A. Cicero news.standford.edu