You can learn a lot about a cell by the company it keeps. Horacio Frydman hopes to learn volumes about mysterious cells in the ovaries of fruit flies that harbor an unexpected guest, an intracellular bacterium called Wolbachia.
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Although he has never taken a biology class, Gene Myers’s work gets a lot of notice from biologists. Fifteen years ago, Myers, whose formal training is in computer science, mathematics, physics, and engineering, co-wrote an article for the Journal of Molecular Biology that would become the most highly cited scientific paper of the decade. read story
It might make for an interesting, albeit exhausting, research project to follow Roland Strauss as he moves through his world observing the ways insects maneuver through theirs. The 43-year-old neurobiologist and gadgetry guru never seems to sit still.
When it comes to getting a start in this world, flies don’t dillydally. After fertilization, a one-celled egg in the fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) takes but three hours to develop into a hollow oval containing some 8,000 cells. Ten minutes later, sheets of cells from the edge of the sphere stream into the center, establishing what will become Drosophila’s internal tissues and organs. In less than a day, the tiny fly larva works its way out from its eggshell. read in full issue (pdf)
The first eyewitness to the birth of a new species may be a University of Arizona graduate student. Her new findings could help biologists identify and understand the precise genetic changes that lead one species to evolve into two separate species. read story
An expert on the brains of flies, cockroaches, and crayfish last week garnered one of the highest honors available to scientists from the United Kingdom. read story