Posted Thursday, February 13, 2020 - Omnia Magazine: All things Penn Arts and Sciences
What are you doing for Valentine’s Day? Does it involve being loaded into a cartridge with a member of the opposite sex, then put in a soundproof chamber, where lights will flash and your romance will be recorded by a tiny individual microphone?
For the fruit flies in Yun Ding’s lab, Valentine’s Day is just another day in paradise. Ding studies their courtship behaviors to learn more about how the genes and brains evolve to change their behaviors.
The vast diversity in how living things act comes about through genes and nervous systems evolving to encode new behavioral patterns, Ding says, but we really don’t know much about how this works. Fruit flies are a great way to study this because one species, Drosophila melanogaster, has been a genetic model for over 100 years, and scientists have learned a lot about how its genes and neurons influence behaviors. There are about 1,500 described species of fruit fly, each with species-specific behaviors, which lets Ding make comparisons between species.
