5 ms·

I’d just add that reverse engineering fruit flies (realistically some component thereof) is actually much easier and relaxing than you suggest. Because fruit f

I’d just add that reverse engineering fruit flies (realistically some component thereof) is actually much easier and relaxing than you suggest. Because fruit flies are a model organism, they are therefore one of the most studied organisms in the world. We arguably know more about fruit flies than humans and try to extrapolate what we know about fruit flies to humans (with varying success). I guess my point is that reverse engineering fruit flies is actually very well documented (in the biological literature, and even textbooks, very well established for decades now).

thaumasiotes 3y ago
There is a lot of documentation on fruit flies. However, the share of fruit fly functionality that is documented is much less than 0.001%. This is fairly described as "undocumented".
twic 3y ago
An unavoidable pain point when working with fruit flies is that there is no way to store them. A fruit fly is either alive, crawling around in a glass tube eating banana paste, or dead. Once it's dead, you can't do experiments on it, and you can't breed it. Fruit flies are used because it is easy to do genetics on them. Genetics means causing random mutations, selecting for something, then breeding them true to make a mutant strain, then crossbreeding, making further mutants, and doing experiments on all the results. Each of those mutant strains is part of your scientific 'capital', something you've invested in and want to extract returns from. You have to preserve it. And to preserve it, you need to transfer ('flip') flies of that strain to a fresh tube of banana paste every three weeks. For all of your strains. Without ever missing a flip. So i'm not sure that working on fruit flies is relaxing, exactly. Maybe if you can afford a technician to look after them for you!

5 ms·

I’d just add that reverse engineering fruit flies (realistically some component thereof) is actually much easier and relaxing than you suggest. Because fruit f

by canadiantim 3y ago

thaumasiotes 3y ago
There is a lot of documentation on fruit flies. However, the share of fruit fly functionality that is documented is much less than 0.001%. This is fairly described as "undocumented".
twic 3y ago
An unavoidable pain point when working with fruit flies is that there is no way to store them. A fruit fly is either alive, crawling around in a glass tube eating banana paste, or dead. Once it's dead, you can't do experiments on it, and you can't breed it. Fruit flies are used because it is easy to do genetics on them. Genetics means causing random mutations, selecting for something, then breeding them true to make a mutant strain, then crossbreeding, making further mutants, and doing experiments on all the results. Each of those mutant strains is part of your scientific 'capital', something you've invested in and want to extract returns from. You have to preserve it. And to preserve it, you need to transfer ('flip') flies of that strain to a fresh tube of banana paste every three weeks. For all of your strains. Without ever missing a flip. So i'm not sure that working on fruit flies is relaxing, exactly. Maybe if you can afford a technician to look after them for you!