Drosophila

IMAGE OF AN ADULT FLY BRAIN:Courtesy of Diane O'DowdO'Dowd's team measured neuronal activity from the central brain region, which is flanked on either side by the visual lobes and eyes (red).Drosophila, the winged workhorse of biology, has reached another milestone. Recently several labs have recorded electrophysiological data from the fly's central nervous system (CNS) neurons. "Drosophila is one of the most powerful neurobiological model systems around. The only thing it lacked was direct acce

Karen Heyman

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Courtesy of Diane O'Dowd

O'Dowd's team measured neuronal activity from the central brain region, which is flanked on either side by the visual lobes and eyes (red).

Drosophila, the winged workhorse of biology, has reached another milestone. Recently several labs have recorded electrophysiological data from the fly's central nervous system (CNS) neurons. "Drosophila is one of the most powerful neurobiological model systems around. The only thing it lacked was direct access to neurons of the CNS," says Leslie Griffith of Brandeis University, Waltham, Mass., where she has been recording from both larval and adult intact central nervous systems.¹"I think that it was time for this technical barrier to fall."

Rachel Wilson and Glenn Turner, postdoctoral researchers in the lab of Gilles Laurent at California Institute of Technology, published a paper in Science based on their recordings in adult flies.2 Wilson credits Diane O'Dowd, a channel biophysicist at the University of ...

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