How Does a Fruit Fly Say “Ouch”?

Fruit flies are an ideal animal for biological research. Fruit flies can grow quickly in the lab, and we can study many fruit flies at the same time. The fruit fly has an outer layer, just like the human skin, to protect itself from injury or damage. If humans and fruit flies respond to injury in similar ways, then we can use fruit flies to discover new steps to improve human health. Using small needles to wound the fruit flies, we are able to ask questions about how fruit flies repair their wounds. We wondered what kind of reaction the fruit flies would have when we injured their skin. Fruit flies are small and we used microscopes to see the wound reaction – Ouch! The goal of this research was to test whether changes in the fruit fly deoxyribonucleic acid changed the way the fruit flies responded to injury.