The fruit fly revolutionized biology. Now it’s boosting science in Africa

When Amos Abolaji returned to Nigeria from a year in a foreign country, he brought home an odd souvenir — two jars packed with fruit flies.

The biochemist had been conducting postdoctoral research on the Federal University of Santa Maria in Brazil on the health effects of certain pollutants. He had used laboratory rodents while engaged on his Ph.D. in Nigeria and wasn’t previously exposed to using fruit flies. But when Abolaji joined toxicologist Joao Batista Teixeira da Rocha’s lab in Brazil, “he told me he stopped using rodents for research.” Rocha had switched to using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

After working with Rocha, Abolaji understood the fruit fly’s power. “The fly has a high degree of benefits in comparison with rodents, specifically in resource-limited regions,” Abolaji says. They’re cheap, easy to lift, require little lab space and can bring fast results — and that they’re poised to lift biomedical research across Africa.

When Abolaji returned to Nigeria in 2014 and have used to be a professor on the University of Ibadan, he took his jars and converted his place of job into a miniature fly lab. He’s now a key figure in a growing movement to set up fruit fly research across Africa, where rodents are still the go-to subject in studies of genetics, developmental biology, toxicology and other fields of biomedical research.

In Africa, fruit fly studies can assist address urgent public health needs, connect local scientists with the global research community and build research capabilities the arena over’s 2d-largest continent.

“We use [the fruit fly] as a tool that may perform now now not just research,” Abolaji says, “but to lift [the] next generation of scientists.”

The history of the fruit fly within the lab

Studying animals to achieve insights into human biology and medicine goes back millennia, as a minimum as some distance back as the usual Greeks. By the twelfth century, Arab physician Ibn Zuhr used to be trying out surgeries on animals sooner than performing them on humans. In the mid-19th century, the Norway rat used to be a mainstay of lab research since the ever-present pest used to be without problems acquired and survived well in captivity.

The fruit fly didn’t enter the lab until 1900, when Harvard entomologist Charles Woodworth began breeding them en masse for reasons which are not entirely clear. He recommended them to researchers studying genetics — a field still in its infancy on the time — and from there the prospective of the fruit fly spread through word of mouth.

The Drosophila boom took off in earnest around 1910, after Thomas Hunt Morgan set up his famous Fly Room at Columbia University. Cluttered with flasks packed with fruit flies and bunches of bananas dangling from the ceiling, the Fly Room hardly ever compares to the sleek and sterile labs of as of late. But in that room, Morgan made the groundbreaking discovery that genes are passed right down to the following generation on chromosomes (SN: 2/7/22).

The fruit fly’s short life cycle allowed the sphere of genetics to take flight. Whatever the undeniable fact that rats reproduce fast for mammals — pregnancy should be 21 days and females reach sexual maturity two to Three months after birth — they have gotten nothing on fruit flies. They are ready to produce a whole new generation in precisely 10 days. This, plus their small genomes, makes the fruit fly a resounding tool for studying how genes and traits are passed down from one generation to the following (SN: 5/17/19).

Drosophila are also used to discover about how embryos change into adults and to examine the biological effects of chemicals. (Because rodents are much more closely related to humans, they continue to be well known model organisms for studying mammal-specific traits and in clinical drug trying out.) Over the last century, 9 scientists have won Nobel Prizes in accordance with work done with fruit flies.

Abolaji’s Drosophila lab is in Ibadan, the third-most populous city in Nigeria and capital of the southwestern state of Oyo. After I reached him over Zoom, he presented a slide show of his history with Drosophila. “I believed it's going to possibly be good if I just share it like a story,” he told me.

A couple of years after bringing fruit flies back from Brazil in 2014, Abolaji used to be approached by DrosAfrica, a company founded in 2013 to increase using Drosophila by African biologists. A trio of Spanish researchers started DrosAfrica after a workshop in Uganda on using insects in neuroscience research. Physiologist Sadiq Yusuf, who used to be then the deputy vice chancellor of Kampala International University and later went on to found a charity supporting research development in Africa regularly is referred to as TReND, had organized the workshop.

He made many significant contributions, including discovering that embryonic cells cluster together in accordance with what anatomical structure they change into, with their fate controlled by certain genes. García-Bellido, it’s been said, “put Spain on the scientific map.”

The Spanish group had recognized that African researchers were primed to make use of fruit flies to accelerate the continent’s research, which is what had befell in Spain some decades earlier.

From Morgan’s Fly Room, D. melanogaster spread quickly to other research labs in North The U.S. and Europe. But now now not every united states caught fly fever. In Spain, virtually no person worked with the fruit fly until Antonio García-Bellido returned to his native united states after finishing a research fellowship at Caltech within the Seventies. Once home, the developmental biologist established a Drosophila lab.

“Then he trained three people, and then these three people trained people,” says María (Lola) Martín-Bermudo, a geneticist at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and a DrosAfrica cofounder. “Now there are a lot of Drosophila labs in Spain.”

To leap-start the same spread of information in Africa, Abolaji and DrosAfrica organized a workshop on the University of Ibadan in 2017, which brought in experienced fruit fly researchers from as some distance as Spain and the United Kingdom to show attendees Drosophila biology and the way the fruit fly should be used to discover about neurodegeneration, cancer and toxicology, along with to assist with drug discovery. “That workshop used to be among the foremost turning points in my research,” Abolaji says.

The workshop hosted participants from some place else in Africa, including Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana. One participant, a young woman from northern Nigeria named Rashidatu Abdulazeez, traveled 18 hours over two days to attend.

Meeting Africa’s urgent public health needs

Long sooner than arriving at that workshop, Abdulazeez had already change into hooked on fruit flies. But she didn’t have a jar of flies from every other lab to start up her work — she had to catch them herself.

She’d read that the flies may well be trapped outdoors, but nothing she tried had worked. While earning a master’s degree in population genetics, Abdulazeez stayed along with her auntie while taking a look to catch flies within town of Kaduna in northwestern Nigeria. “[Perhaps] they don’t stay some distance from humans,” her auntie suggested.

Thinking the flies may perhaps prefer human trash to other lures, Abdulazeez disregarded a bowl of rotten fruit overnight. “I had a dream that I caught various Drosophila,” Abdulazeez recalls with a laugh. In the morning, her dream had come true.

In 2016, after solving the fly-catching problem, she published an analysis of the genetic variation of Nigeria’s D. melanogaster populations.

Like Abolaji, Abdulazeez had to learn a lot about Drosophila on her own. However it used to be worth it. “I started to fall in love [with fruit flies] because I was just so amazed by the undeniable fact that we had a lot in common,” she says, relating to the 60 percentof our DNA that we share with fruit flies. And importantly, seventy five percentof the genes that cause disease in humans are also found within the flies.

Abdulazeez is now a lecturer (equivalent to a professor) at her alma mater, Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria. Toward the tip of our video call, she took me into the hallway as she headed to a meeting and identified the poster on her lab’s door: a black-and-white image of a fruit fly peering through a microscope, with the words “Small Lab Big Science” blazoned across the pinnacle.

The “Big Science” benefits of Drosophila as a model organism stem from now now not simplest its similarities to us, but additionally its key differences, like being easy to handle. Starting a Drosophila lab can require as little as a jar of flies and a handful of microscopes, while a colony of lab rats can take up a whole room’s worth of cages. The benefit of using fruit flies is a huge boon for a continent with many local public health concerns but little local research funding.

“I perform research a fine technique to have a fine suggestion effects on humans,” Abolaji says. Some pollutants within the environment can predispose people to cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s disease and a whole host of other afflictions, he says, and he uses fruit flies to needless to assert why.

One pollutant that Abolaji has studied is four-vinylcyclohexene, a by-constituted of the manufacturing of pesticides, plastics and tires. Plastic manufacturing has been growing in Nigeria, from 120,000 tons in 2007 to an estimate of more than 500,000 tons in 2020, that means more and more more workers are potentially being exposed to VCH. In monkeys and rats, VCH is believed to destroy follicles in ovaries, so there’s concern that exposure may well cause early menopause in humans.

“A girl that is working in an environment where such compounds are manufactured or produced or used as by-­products, [who is] imagined to achieve success in menopause at fifty six, may reach menopause at 30 or 35,” Abolaji says.

But how VCH harms ovarian follicles used to be elusive. Abolaji got a bit of by exposing Drosophila to VCH and analyzing the resulting changes within the fruit fly’s gene activity and physiology. The chemical causes the production of toxic types of oxygen-­containing molecules is referred to as free radicals, which damage cells.

In Tunisia, Hayet Sellami hopes to leverage the ability of fruit flies to create a drug-screening factory, speeding up the technique of identifying new medical treatments. Sellami, a medical doctor and researcher, says her journey with Drosophila began with a pair of workshops in 2018 and 2019 hosted by her institution, the University of Sfax, and arranged by DrosAfrica and a qualified network of scientists regularly is referred to as Young Tunisian Researchers in Biology. Impressed by the workshops, university administrators approved creating a Drosophila research unit.

“Our research unit is the primary [in Tunisia] to make use of Drosophila as a low-cost model for research,” Sellami says. She hopes to start up fruit fly research in earnest this year, and once the lab is fully up and running, researchers will handle to quickly screen prospective drugs by trying out them on fruit flies. If a drug seems promising, the following step should be tests on rodents. The use of Drosophila as a first pass for drugs will save valuable money and time which may well otherwise be spent raising and caring for expensive rats and mice.

One of Sellami’s interests is using the flies to examine potential antifungal drugs. “This [is] a fine opportunity to improve our university and to have practical research,” she says, and lead to “better health handle our people.”

In a 2022 discover about, 63 percentof the fungus Candida albicans collected from pregnant Tunisian women’s vaginas used to be proof against the common antifungal drug fluconazole. C. albicans should be harmless, however it's going to cause yeast infections which may well lead to rare pregnancy complications. So finding new antifungal drugs is a pressing concern.

Lab animal all-stars

Biologists have a menagerie of animals they turn to in experiments. Here are a substantial number of the species which are mainstays within the lab.

Roundworm (Caenorhabditis elegans)
Somewhat like the fruit fly, the 1-millimeter-long C. elegans is well known in studies of genetics and development. To boot as having a short life cycle and being cheap to handle, the worm should be frozen and revived, unlike other lab animals, and its transparent body makes for easy observations of cells (unlike the false-colour worm shown at left). But C. elegans’ straight forward body — lacking blood, most internal organs and other features of more complex beings — limits it use as a model of human physiology and disease.
Similarity to humans: sixty five% of disease genes shared
Age at sexual maturity: Three days
Birth rate: >140 eggs/day

Zebrafish (Danio rerio)
About as big as a security pin, the zebrafish is a vertebrate and therefore more like humans than C. elegans or the fruit fly. Since it’s easy to keep up within the lab and transparent as an embryo, the zebrafish offers advantages over the mouse in studies of genetics and development. But since the fish lacks certain tissues and body parts, equivalent to lungs, it isn’t as versatile in physiology and disease research.
Similarity to humans: Eighty% of disease genes shared
Age at sexual maturity: 2–four months
Birth rate: 200–300 eggs/week

Mouse (Mus musculus)
As some distance as mammals go, the mouse survives well in captivity. And it’s similar enough to humans to be a viable choice for studies of disease and even behavior. Still, many health findings in mice don’t end up translating to people.
Similarity to humans: >90% of disease genes shared
Age at sexual maturity: 1.5–2 months
Birth rate: 6–12 offspring/litter; as much as fifteen litters/year

Rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)
As a fellow primate, the rhesus macaque is highly tons like humans as some distance as basic biology goes, making the monkey valuable in research into infectious diseases equivalent to HIV/AIDS and chronic illnesses, reproduction, aging, drug development and more. But a prolonged life span, slow reproductive cycle and intricate social structure make the monkey challenging and expensive to keep up in captivity. And the close kinship to humans has led to moral questions about using rhesus macaques (and other primates) in lab experiments.
Similarity to humans: Ninety seven.5% of all genes shared
Age at sexual maturity: Three–four years
Birth rate: 1 offspring/year

Boosting fruit fly research across Africa

The University of Sfax is following within the footsteps of the University of Ibadan, where the small fly lab Abolaji founded in 2014 has blossomed into the separate Drosophila Research and Training Centre. It serves as a regional hub for scientists eager about working with fruit flies. Sellami hopes that Sfax becomes a hub for North Africa. By investing in fruit fly research, African institutions also now have the prospect to join the enduring insect’s global fan club.

Biologist Ross Cagan of the University of Glasgow in Scotland used to be among the Drosophila researchers recruited by DrosAfrica to run workshops. He now collaborates with both Abolaji and Sellami on medical research that now now not simplest has health implications for Africans but for people globally.

“My lab develops some technology we call ‘fly avatar,’” Cagan says. The use of gene editing, specific genetic mutations of individual cancer patients are introduced into fruit flies. The goal is to capture the complexity of a patient’s cancer in a group of Drosophila flies to discover about how those mutated genes impact tumor progression and the way the cancer responds to drugs.

“Among the important questions about the table is, what’s the variation between a European tumor and an African tumor?” Cagan says. Abolaji’s team is generating fly avatars that mimic the genetics of Nigerian patients with colorectal cancer.

Abolaji is “somebody that the more you get to know him, the more impressive he becomes,” Cagan says. “That collaboration goes beautifully. Or not it's some distance in point of fact growing out of Nigeria.”

The largest money for research still lies in Western institutions, and writing grants to get the funding for ambitious projects is challenging even for scientists in North The U.S. and Europe. Western collaborators can assist African researchers navigate this path. Sellami recently submitted a proposal to Horizon Europe, a seven-year funding initiative of the European Union, in collaboration with Cagan to make stronger Sfax’s research into personalized medicine with fly avatars. Sellami and Abolaji have also teamed as much as submit a proposal to every other EU funding initiative, Erasmus+.

One thing that makes these international collaborations stand out is that African scientists are guiding the research questions, says Marta Vicente-Crespo, cofounder of DrosAfrica and a program manager on the Nairobi-based Consortium for Progressed Research Training in Africa. Often in such collaborations, African researchers get what’s been dubbed “stuck within the middle.” They'll compile data, but now now not analyze or interpret it, while Western scientists lead the project and claim the more prestigious first and last authorship spots on papers.

“There has been various tokenization,” Vicente-Crespo says. “Things are changing, but very slowly.”

The legacy of colonization has left many areas of Africa with little capital, this implies that students taking a look to do research often should fund the projects themselves. “We don’t have funding,” Abdulazeez says. “After you come for any of your degrees, you in general sponsor yourself.” Because rodents are expensive, students often can’t come up with the money for to make use of many, resulting in studies with low sample sizes and thus conclusions that aren’t reliable enough to publish.

“They get their degree, nonetheless the science doesn’t go anywhere,” Vicente-Crespo adds.

By using Drosophila, money which may well have long gone to feeding some rodents for several weeks can instead change into thousands of fruit flies. Abdulazeez estimates that one mouse costs about 1,000 naira, the Nigerian currency; buying Eighty of them would cost more than many Nigerians make in a month.

A fruit fly homecoming

There's a poetic side to D. melanogaster’s upward thrust in African research — like humans, the fruit fly evolved in Africa sooner than spreading around the arena. Though they came to dominate the globe through an association with humans — living off our food waste — they once lived more pastoral lives. Researchers in 2018 found a population of D. melanogaster living in a wooded area in Zimbabwe, unaffiliated with humans. These flies fed and laid their eggs on the fruit of marula flowers. The Indigenous San people of southern Africa historically collected marula fruit and stored them in caves, where the fruit fermented. Researchers speculate that this shared use of marula in the tip sparked the human-fly connection that persists to this day.

Abdulazeez is most smitten by the ecology and evolution of fruit flies. For now, though, as the leader of a brand new research group, she’s focusing on more urgent health problems — like lead poisoning — and on inspiring the following generation of Nigerian biologists. “We still have people that find themselves yet to just accept the undeniable fact that we may well use these flies for fantastic things,” she says.

To combat this problem, she founded Droso4Nigeria, a company that works to bring Drosophila-based biology lessons into Nigerian secondary schools and trains teachers to make use of the fruit fly within the faculty room.

Abolaji also stresses the importance of education and training. “The final word goal is to lift and develop the following generation of scientists in Africa,” he says.

While international grants and collaborations are important, the ongoing success of Africa’s Drosophila-fueled research boom wouldn’t be which that you may still imagine without the fervour, talent and resourcefulness of the African scientists leading the style. Throughout our video call, Abolaji showed me the temperature-controlled incubator he uses to lift flies; a brand new you may cost upward of $10,000, but Abolaji fashioned his out of an old drink chiller (the kind you’d pull a bottle of soda from on the food market) for lower than $500.

“Europe will now now not develop Africa for us. The U.S. will now now not develop Africa for us,” Abolaji says. “We are the ones to in point of fact build Africa.”