Fruit flies and alzheimer's
Those tiny and annoying specks that fly round a slightly fruity fruit bowl are vital to science. Fruit flies may be small but they provide great insight in human genetics.
They're also fascinating creatures to study. Next time you find one hovering over your bananas try trapping it in a tube. Fruit flies are hardwired to avoid light and move in the opposite direction to gravity. Which means they'll cluster at the top of the tube unless you shine a light on them. You might like to speculate why they've evolved like this.
For scientists studying how alzheimer's works in humans the attractions of using fruit flies are clear. We know everything about the genetics of these insects and are also able to put human proteins into them. For alzheimer's work this allows researchers to put the human Tau protein and another human protein into the flies and see the results of the interaction of the two.
You find clumps of Tau protein inside the brains of people who have had alzheimer's. These clumps kill brain cells and eventually whole sections of the brain die too. And that causes alzheimer's. But we understand very little about what causes all this. We need basic research which means studying the interaction of these human proteins inside fruit flies.
And while you can dissect a fruit fly to learn what's gone on; it isn't an easy job. Fortunately in this case you can gauge the extent of the interaction of the two human proteins by the amount of disorder caused in the eyes of the flies. You can see just this in this picture, normal fly on the left and disordered eye on the right.
Of course the physicist in me sees a simple experiment where you just get a load of flies to breed and then bung 'em in the scanning electron microscope for their eyeball close-ups. In fact my lack of experience with biological systems means I had completely forgotten that a major part of the research is breeding up a large population of flies with all the right genes in all the right places to work with in the first place.
As the scientists conducting the study explained to me it is just a piece of the jigsaw. But the stigma associated with alzheimer's means research in this area is years behind the science of other big diseases like cancer. So these jigsaw pieces of basic research are essential to making the big picture that will lead to new treatments.
I'm David Gregory, ´óÏó´«Ã½ Science Correspondent for the West Midlands. My first law states: "Science is the answer." There is no second law. Feel free to drop me a line: 
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