Tag Archives: RCL1314

Most people do not conjure up happy images when they hear the words “fruit fly,” instead, they picture a dirty bug that lands in their food or acts as a pest that needs to be swatted away. Though fruit flies can sometimes be annoying, they are still very important to the scientific community. The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster has served as a model organism for many research projects, especially those studying genetics.¹

Drosophila melanogaster is a useful organism for scientific studies for many reasons. First, they are somewhat genetically similar to humans, thus many genetic diseases found in humans can also be found in the fruit fly. Secondly, they are cheap to work with and easy to obtain. They reproduce rapidly and have a short life cycle. Thirdly, they only have four pairs of chromosomes and a small genome, making it easy to study the effects of genetic manipulations on phenotypes.¹

Over the course of history, Drosophila melanogaster has allowed scientists to make major breakthroughs in genetic research. For example, Thomas Hunt Morgan, who won the Nobel Prize in 1933, studied Drosophila mutations to help explain the role of chromosomes in heredity.² In addition, the first genetic map was made using the fruit fly. In 1981, scientists discovered how to make transgenic flies using transposable element vectors, making the fly the first animal with a mutant phenotype caused by gene transfer.²

In the future, Drosophila might be used to make even more breakthroughs about genetics. It may also serve as a model for many more human diseases and play a key role in testing pharmaceutical drugs. It might be possible to do high-throughput drug screening, which allows a researcher to conduct millions of tests in a short amount of time, on fruit flies.³

⁴Drosophila melanogaster

Though Drosophila melanogaster is a useful model organism, it is not a perfect organism for all tests. It does have many differences genetically and morphologically compared to humans and may react differently to drugs than humans would. However, there is no perfect model organism when it comes to genetic or drug tests, and Drosophila melanogaster will continue to be useful in the future to the medical community.

¹“Drosophila as a Model Organism.” Science. N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Feb. 2014.

²Rubin, Gerald M., and Edward B. Lewis. “A Brief History of Drosophila’s Contributions to Genome Research.” N.p., n.d. Web. 03 Feb. 2014.

³“Human Disease Models in Drosophila Melanogaster and the Role of the Fly in Therapeutic Drug Discovery.” Pharmacological Reviews. Ed. Eric L. Barker. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

⁴“File:Drosophila Melanogaster – Fruit Fly.png.” Wikimedia Commons. N.p., n.d. Web. 5 Feb. 2014.

When people think of animals important to the scientific community, the often think of chimpanzees, mice, or other animals known for their part as test subjects for scientific experiments. Very rarely will something think of an animal like the horseshoe crab, despite its vast importance to modern medicine.

¹ A Horseshoe Crab

For those of you who do not know, horseshoe crabs are marine arthropods. They are related to arachnids and are not closely related to crabs or horses, despite their name. They have a long tail uses for steering and can get up to two feet long. They can be found on beaches, including beaches along the eastern shore of North America. ²

Now you probably are wondering how this weird arthropod has significance to the medical community. The answer is found in the horseshoe crab’s blood. If you ever got a medical injection, such as a vaccination, you should thank the horseshoe crab. Most injectable medications are tested on the horseshoe crab before they are given to people because the horseshoe crab has amebocytes in their blood, which are used in defense against bacteria. Unlike mammals, the horseshoe crab does not have an immune system. However, when the horseshoe crab’s blood is exposed to bacteria, viruses, and other pathogens, it will clot. So when their blood is exposed to bacteria endotoxins, it will clot in order to eliminate the threat of the endotoxin and to provide a barrier against further contamination. Endotoxins are a big concern to the medical community because they are not eliminated through steam sterilization and can cause a fever or other negative side effects if injected in a human. Thus testing medications on the horseshoe crab makes injections safer for humans.³

I really like the use of horseshoe crabs to test for endotoxins because only a minority of horseshoe crabs dies from the process. Many scientific experiments, other than pure observation experiments, result in the death of the specimens used. However, when scientists use horseshoe crab blood for their experiments, they collect the crabs from the wild, take them to a lab, extract their blood, and then release them back in the wild. Less than 3% of horseshoe crabs die from the process.³ It would be awesome if scientists could find similar ways to use other organisms, preserving the animals’ lives while also getting valuable information; however, realistically it will not be possible in the near future.

¹“Horseshoe Crab Q&As | The Nature Conservancy.” Horseshoe Crab Q&As | The Nature Conservancy. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.
²“Horseshoe Crab Printout – EnchantedLearning.com.” Horseshoe Crab Printout – EnchantedLearning.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.
3″Medical Uses.” Medical Uses. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Jan. 2014.

Last semester, I focused my blog on animals and some of the lessons they have taught us. This semester, I will continue to write my blog about animals, but instead will focus on the importance of animals throughout human society. Animals play an integral role in the ecosystem and world as a whole, and I hope to explore how animals have helped improve human development, advance medicine, contribute to art, and overall enhance human lives. Hopefully, my blog will be able to show people who feel neutral about animals or are not particularly fond of animals that their lives are significantly impacted by the other creatures around them.

In addition, I would like to focus part of my blog on the importance of conservation. Animals may provide many medical and scientific breakthroughs in the future, but they will only be possible if people realize the importance of conservation. I hope to highlight some fascinating species that may become extinct in the near future if humans do not work together to help them.

To conclude, I would like to emphasize one way that animals have influenced our lives: through their companionship. Many people have pets that have provided unconditional love, and statistics show that people with pets live better lives. For example, people with pets who had heart issues were three times less likely to die than their counterparts without pets.¹ One only needs to look at the statistics to see how much the pet industry affects our lives. In 2013, people spent an estimated $55.53 billion on pet food, supplies, medicine, vet care, and other related products.² In addition, in 2012, 36.5% of households had a dog and 30.4% of households had a cat.³ The prevalence of pets in human society shows that animals are in fact, a large part of the economy and our lives.

¹“Between Pets and People: The Importance of Animal Companionship” by Alan M. Beck and Aaron Honori Katcher
²http://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp
³https://www.avma.org/KB/Resources/Statistics/Pages/Market-research-statistics-US-pet-ownership.aspx

“But there’s one sound, that no one knows. What did the fox say?”¹

For centuries, people have used words to describe what animals say. It is easy for us to simplify the range of noises made by a species into one word, or a couple of words. Cats meow. Dogs bark.

Austintexas.gov

Whenever I tell people that I want to be a veterinarian, people often tell me how hard it is because “at least doctors can speak to their patients; animals cannot tell you what is wrong.” I think they do have a point, but I think animals can tell people about their illnesses. They can communicate with us, but we oftentimes fail to understand them because we are unwilling to learn their language. I have learned many lessons from animals because I spent a lot of time getting to know them, and I also was able to see the human characteristics in animal behavior. Though some may argue that it is “unscientific” to do so, I do not think there is anything wrong with realizing that humans do have many similarities with animals.

I would like to conclude my passion blog with this point: we tend to reject ideas sometimes for the sole reason that the idea is spoken in a way we do not understand. We dismiss foreign ways of grieving and healing because we view them from a Western “scientific” perspective, instead of thinking about how healing is more than using drugs to elicit a specific cellular response. We conclude that evolution has given animals remarkable instincts, reducing animals’ remarkable ability to fit into niches in this world to “a largely inheritable and unalterable tendency of an organism to make a complex and specific response to environmental stimuli without involving reason” instead of thinking about how we too, are driven in part by instinct, but also by our own desires and fate.²

So maybe the fox says more than “Ring-ding-ding-ding dingeringeding!” Maybe the fox has a lot to say about caring for young, survival despite harsh environmental conditions, and the importance of large stretches of unadulterated land where animals can run and play. However, we will only hear if we are willing to stop, keep an open mind, and listen.

Pixdaus.com

¹Ylvis. “The Fox.” 2013.
²“Instinct.” Def. 2. Merriam-Webster. N.d. Web.