In terms of the relevance of fly studies to our understanding of intestinal inflammation in mammals, it is noteworthy that several of the pathways that regulate intestinal stem cell signaling in flies are common to those present in mouse and human enterocytes, including the JAK-STAT pathway (Suzuki et al., 2001; Koon et al., 2006; Jiang et al., 2009; Liu, W. et al., 2010).
The dynamic analysis of buffer fullness can be carried out with on-the-fly study of filling rate of the buffer with some prior knowledge of filling pattern.
"The thousands of tiny droplets of glue that cover the capture spiral of the spider's orb web do much more than make the silk sticky and catch the fly," study author Fritz Vollrath of the Oxford Silk Group said in a statement.
However, the purpose of fly studies is not to model the intestinal disease processes (although there is some evidence, as discussed above, that this is possible), nor to evaluate the efficacy of potential drug therapies.
Although we know that, upon maturation, intestinal cells become apoptotic or are sloughed, results of fly studies tell us that enterocyte apoptosis can precede and actually induce regeneration (Apidianakis et al., 2009).
Drosophila screens will undoubtedly reveal unidentified genes and signalling pathways that are involved in repair and inflammation that can be further tested in mammals; indeed, the results of fly studies are already influencing how we approach questions about wound healing in vertebrates.
Rather, fly studies afford the unparalleled benefit of allowing for large-scale determination of the role of individual disease-associated genes on the function of the whole organism (Hou, 2010; Lindquist et al., 2011).
Fly studies also showed that inactivation of the fly orthologue of PI4KA is lethal (47).
Finally, the role of polarity genes in cell proliferation has been nicely elucidated in several fly studies [referred to in Humbert et al. (Humbert et al., 2008)], including studies of fly intestine (Apidianakis et al., 2009), paving the way for investigations of similar roles in mammals (Rothenberg et al., 2010).
But for all their ties to Anglican tradition, the school's 41 students are still 21st-century children who read "Lord of the Flies," study fluid dynamics, work on computers and, as everywhere, tend toward high spirits -- though sometimes manifested in a slightly different way.
The two surfaces corresponded closely, despite substantial procedural differences across studies and differences in mean lifespan between capillary-fed, singly housed flies in the study of Lee et al. [ 3] and flies housed in groups and fed agar-based diets in the other experiments.
