Fruit Flies helping us understand cancer

While we use Fruit Flies in genetics lab to study inheritance patterns, we never imagine that researchers are also studying them in order to better understand diseases. However, Dr. Mark Matfield of the Association for International Cancer Research is doing just that. He says “Cancer is a disease of the most fundamental processes of living organisms, which is why it is found in all animals.” This is why it can be studied in fruit flies, which are easy and cheap to breed. AICR plans on using fruit flies to understand how the changes in proteins impact how the cells divide, thus understand how cancer begins. Cells can control activity of their proteins by adding chemical groups also called “tags” to change them. The problems occur when the enzymes that make these modifications occur at high levels. Another problem that occurs is that sometimes these enzymes tag incorrectly which causes uncontrolled division and growth. Without this regulation a mass of cells, also called a tumor, begin to form. The goal of this research is to study these enzymes in fruit flies to understand them better and how they controls cell division. The research teams choose to study a living animal “rather than in human cells grown in test tubes or in unicellular organisms, such as yeast, as previously studies have done.” This new approach to studying cancer cells seems optimistic and hopefully can help reveal mechanisms in cell division.