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Subject: Drosophila melanogaster Sat Jan 17, 2009 8:10 pm

Within a few years of the rediscovery of Mendel's rules in 1900, Drosophila melanogaster (the so-called fruit fly) became a favorite "model" organism for genetics research.
Some of the reasons for its popularity:

* The flies are small and easily reared in the laboratory.
* They have a short life cycle The figure shows the various stages of the life cycle (not all drawn to the same scale). A new generation of adult flies can be produced every two weeks.
* They are fecund; a female may lay hundreds of fertilized eggs during her brief life span. The resulting large populations make statistical analysis easy and reliable.
* The giant ("polytene") chromosomes in the salivary (and other) glands of the mature larvae.
o These chromosomes show far more structural detail than do normal chromosomes, and
o they are present during interphase when chromosomes are normally invisible.

pirat

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