How are fruit flies used in human research?

Question: How are fruit flies used in human research?
- Keywords:
  fruit flies,
  human,
  research
Asked by spacenut1982 to Christina, Colin, Jess, Samaneh, Steve on 25 Jun 2013.
- Christina Pagel answered on 25 Jun 2013:
  
  I think the key think about fruitflies is that they breed really quickly – so if you want to test evolutionary theories, you can just separate two populations, put them in different conditions and see what happens as they evolve! (ditto for seeing the effect of changing genes in fruitflies).
  
  Other advantages to fruit flies is that they are easy to take care off (just give them fruity water), are small but not invisible (so you can see them with the naked eye) and are easy to knock out (so you can study them under a microscope easily).
  
  Plus they share 75% of their DNA with humans so we can learn quite a bit about our DNA but looking at fruit flies…

spacenut1982 commented on 25 Jun 2013:

Wow! What’s the advantage of making worms glow in the dark?

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- Christina commented on 26 Jun 2013:
  
  I don’t know?! I suppose it might be useful to be able to make living things glow – one day they might make glowing sheep and then farmers can find their sheep in the dark! 😀
  
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Question: How are fruit flies used in human research?