Question

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is an important model system for studying inheritance in animals and genetic control of animal development, including humans. Evaluate Drosophila as a model system for human biology. What are their strengths and weaknesses as a model system? g

Answer 1

Answer:

The correct answer is "strengths: inexpensive, easy to culture, short life cycle, large number of offspring; weaknesses: invertebrate model, some diseases such as immunological cannot be modelled, anatomical features are very different from humans"

Explanation:

The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster is one of the most used animal model for genetic and biomedical studies. There are many advantages of using Drosophila as model, including that it is very inexpensive to handle, it is easy to culture, it has a short life cycle allowing to observe the changes in phenotype very quickly and its large number of offspring allows to include several repetitions per trait in a study. However, there are some weaknesses of using Drosophila to study human biology. First, obviously the fruit fly is very different from humans, it is an invertebrate and its anatomical features are very different, which makes impossible to model some disorders such as immunological diseases.