Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Fruit Flies, Why?

Episode Date: November 4, 2020

Have you ever wondered why we do so much scientific testing on fruit flies? Turns out they make better models for humans than you’d think. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and Jerry's buzzing around out there somewhere. I'm sorry. And this is short stuff, like I think I said. Yeah, the tzitzi fly, something that if, if you took high school biology, you talked about these little fellows. The what fly? The tzitzi fly.

I thought we were talking about fruit flies. Isn't that the tzitzi fly? I don't think so. Is that different? Yeah, I'm pretty sure. I always thought the tzitzi fly was the same thing as the fruit fly now. No, because I think the tzitzi fly, is that how you say it?

It gives like passes around dengue fever. Oh, well, just never mind then everybody. What we're really talking about is the fruit fly, a.k.a. the drosophila, and it's impossible to read this next word without reading it like this. Milano gangster, but it's not gangster. Unfortunately, it's Milano Gaster. Yeah, most people call them drosophila though.

Oh, I've always heard drosophila now. Oh man, I don't know. Now that you say that, I've never heard it out loud. I've always seen it in writing. So when you said most people say it that way, you just lied. So what I mean is, oh my gosh, yeah, I totally just did. Thank you for calling me out for that.

Just a malign machine apparently, because I didn't even realize it. They're Milano gangsters, no matter what. Okay, so we're talking, let's just call them fruit flies. How about that? Or tzitzi flies. But there is a bunch, and by the way, tzitzi flies are large biting flies.

So that is definitely not these. Geez, I don't know where. Now we have to do a short stuff on those guys. Thanks, Chuck. Literally, probably one eighth of the show is now misinformation. So fruit flies specifically, how did you say it? Drosophila?

That's what I said. It's much more beautiful than what I said. So I'm gonna go with that too. Most people say drosophila. Those particular kinds of fruit flies, drosophila, melanogaster, they are widely used in scientific experiments, and it turns out, as a lot of people know,

that we use fruit flies in experiments, they've actually bestowed a tremendous amount of information to us humans through their biology, through their genetics, through their very existence. We owe a great debt to them scientifically because a lot of them have been asked to sacrifice their lives for the furtherance of human knowledge. Yeah, and there's a bunch of reasons,

which we're gonna get to kind of here and there in a sec, but you dug up this kind of interesting bit from February 1947, a V2 rocket full to the brim, well, not full to the brim, but a lot of fruit flies were loaded up on this thing, traveled 67 miles up into the air, which is technically an altitude which is one mile into actual space, according to NASA,

and they were the very first animals to go into space. Yeah, and they actually survived that trip, and not one of, like they were the first animal, they were like a test animal to see, scientists were like, well, no one's ever been to space, we have no idea what happens out there, maybe these things are gonna come back all mutated and everything, and when they didn't,

when they actually survived the flight and the reentry, they said, oh, well, let's start sending more larger animals up, and they did, and eventually we ended up on humans, and that's what we're sending up these days. That's right, but it was very instructive to see those flies come back without seven eyeballs or twice the size or 10 times the size.

They were fine, they didn't hulk out. Yeah, and by that, yeah, no purple ripped pants to be found. By that time, by 1947, they had actually been used in biological studies for well over a decade. In the 1930s in particular, they basically helped establish the field of modern genetics. A guy named Morgan, Thomas Hunt Morgan, basically showed that inheritance is passed along

via chromosomes using a fruit fly study, and he did it in months rather than years that his other fellow early geneticists took to prove their studies and actually ended up winning a Nobel Prize for it, and in fact, at least five people have won Nobel Prizes from directly working with fruit flies. Yeah, I mean, if you want a Nobel Prize,

not a bad place to start. That's right. And the reason why, or maybe we should take a break and then talk about some of the reasons why. Okay. Right after this? Yes. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

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Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right. The reasons why fruit flies are really great, uh, are multi-fold, uh, one of the reasons, if you're going to study genetics,

what you need to study is generations. Right. And fruit flies are really quick. They can create a new generation in about two weeks. Yeah. So, that means you can study generation after generation in short order. They are very easy to breed in the lab.

They're small. They don't put up much of a fuss. No, all they ask for is... Easy to care for. Yeah, they just want a little cornstarch and sugar soup and they're happy. Yeah, a little fruit maybe. Yeah.

Yeah, you don't even have to give them fruit. That's really cornstarch and sugar soup is, is fine with them. But yeah, ultimately, I'm sure they prefer the real deal, you know, but if they're being raised in a lab their entire life and countless generations that they, of their lineage before them have been raised in a lab,

they'll take the cornstarch and sugar soup, if that's all they can get. Right. But why, oh why, my friend, if you're going to study human genetics, would you even bother looking at a fruit fly? Well, that's a great question, Chuck. And the answer to it is that we share a surprising number of genes with fruit flies.

Apparently 8,000 of our 20,000 to 25,000 genes are analogous to fruit fly genes. That's really amazing. Yeah. So, if you study those genes in fruit flies, you can extrapolate to humans, you know, what they do, what happens when you poke them with a whatever, what happens if you shine a light on them,

if you're doing an optogenetic study. There's a lot of questions that we've answered through genetics because of that benefit of having similar genes. And apparently 75% of the genes known to cause diseases in humans are shared between humans and fruit flies, too. Right. It's so cool.

Another cool thing you can do if you want to say, oh, I don't know, like what if you live in the Arctic and you're always or the greater Northern climates of Canada and you're just basically cold all the time. What is that going to do to your gene activity and your metabolism? Well, let's put 2,000 fruit flies in a chamber

and make it super cold all the time. Right. And look at them and see what happens. You can get a large population study very, very easily because these little fellows are so tiny. Yeah. They also share, in addition to genes, a lot of the same biochemical pathways

that humans have, too. One example I saw is that they don't actually get Alzheimer's, but they have all of the same pathways and brain structures that Alzheimer's befalls in humans. So we can study those pathways and try to treat Alzheimer's just by looking at these pathways and these brain structures in fruit flies. Yeah, I also thought it was funny when you look

at the downside of fruit flies, aside from just some of the genetic components, the biggest downside, it seems like, is it their fruit flies? And fruit flies are super annoying. They really are very annoying. They're apparently what's called a cosmopolitan species. So wherever humans are, they're going to be there, too. And the reason why is apparently because we live

in conditions that they find very suitable, like moderate temperatures that are fairly stable. And we like fruit, too. And sometimes we leave our fruit out and it gets a little past ripe. And the fruit flies say, thank you, sir or madam. They doff their little top hat, click their heels together with their spats,

and they go to town on that juicy banana. Yeah, or I guess if you have a juicy banana, you want to throw that out. Yeah, but did you see that listener mail, by the way, about the banana bread banana? No. Someone emailed about something you said and said that I think one of the big reasons, too,

is because they get really, really sweet. Is why you want to use an old banana. I got you. But anyway, the fruit flies love all that stuff. So if you live near a dumpster, unfortunately, for you, which I did in my apartment in Los Angeles. Oh, boy. I had a dumpster behind my apartment,

which is where I found my cat, LaRon, by the way. Well, then it all worked out, yeah. Or if you compost, God help you. It's a great thing to do, but you're going to be dealing with some fruit flies. You are. And again, I mean, there's really not a lot, besides annoyance, that fruit flies provide humans.

Like they don't transfer or transmit communicable diseases. They're not a disease vector. And on the flip side of that, they've actually stood in as models for disease-carrying insects. Like we know a lot about how mosquitoes transmit disease by studying fruit flies as models. So they basically annoy us, but they've furthered our understanding and medicine

in countless ways. And yet we're still like, yeah, but they're annoying. You know what I mean? Yeah, you know. That's so human. It is. But they're not like that rat that sees you fly. No, that dengue fever spreading mofo.

And apparently if you do compost inside, and you have a, even if you have a thing with the lid, they're going to gather around, you can set up a little vinegar jar, like a canning jar with vinegar at the bottom. And then a top made of plastic wrap with some holes in there. And you can trap them and even remove them safely, I think, if you want. Yeah, just throw them out in the yard and say,

go find a juicy banana because I don't want it. Although it is true, you can use those for banana bread. I forgot. Yeah. So fruit fly is a hoi. The next time you see a fruit fly, don't swat at it. Say, thank you, fruit fly. Your kind has been very beneficent to my kind,

and I appreciate that. That's right. And since Chuck said that's right and tapped his watch, short stuff is out. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.