SALVADOR, Renee M.

S-BIOL327LA
MEB24

It was in the early 1900s when Thomas Hunt Morgan used the fruit fly or Drosophila
melanogaster as an ideal animal model in genetics. Though it is quite unseemly to use a fruit fly
as a basis to study genetics, it was still considered because it is cheap and easy to maintain,
and they are much easier to study than complex vertebrates. This is because they only have 4
pairs of chromosomes which is much lesser compared to the 23 pairs of chromosomes in
humans, making it easier to modify. They also live for only a short period of time which is useful
in the research setting too. Because of this, major breakthroughs in the field of science and
medicine took place.

Fruit flies may not seem as important to us now, but if it were not for their genetic
contribution to science, we would not even have half of the medicines and knowledge that we
have today.