We are used to seeing them dive-bombing our glass of wine or hovering around the fruit bowl.
But now the tiny fruit fly is paving the way in ground-breaking research at the University of Auckland.
PhD candidate Jia Zhao of the University of Auckland is using the miniscule flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, into research on the circadian clock.
Her work, under the supervision of Dr James Cheeseman and Associate Professor Guy Warman, in the Department of Anaesthesiology, has discovered a molecular marker linked to the biological clock which accurately predicts the animal’s death several days before it dies.
Their paper, Clock gene expression and locomotor activity predict death in the last days of life in Drosophila melanogaster, has just been published in Scientific Reports.
In the study they investigated how the molecular clock in the brain and in the peripheral tissues changes with increasing age and before death. They examined whether strong entrainment cues improve age-related functional decline of the circadian clock. They were able to measure real-time expression of clock genes products PERIOD and TIMELESS in the Drosophila in three ages, (10, 30- and 50-days-old) for an extended period of time.
The circadian clock generates the daily rhythms in most organisms. This clock is affected by time and diminishes with advancing age.
“We are interested in the circadian clock which you and I and every animal has,” Dr Cheeseman says.