The rooms that make up the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at Indiana University are lined wall to wall with identical shelves.
The tens of thousands of fruit fly types housed within vials on those shelves, though, are each magnificently different. Some have eyes that fluoresce pink. Some jump when you shine a red light on them. Some have short bodies and iridescent curly wings, and look "like little ballerinas," said Carol Sylvester, who helps care for them.
Each variety doubles as a unique research tool, and it has taken decades to introduce the traits that make them useful. If left unattended, the flies would die in a matter of weeks, marooning entire scientific disciplines.
To most observers, fruit flies are little dots with wings that hang out near old bananas. But over the past century, researchers have turned the insect — known to science as Drosophila melanogaster — into a sort of genetic switchboard. Biologists regularly develop new "strains" of flies, in which particular genes are turned on or off.
Studying these mutations can reveal how those genes function — including in humans, because we share more than half of our genes with Drosophila. For instance, researchers discovered what is now called the hippo gene — which helps regulate organ size in both fruit flies and vertebrates — after flies with a defect in it grew up to be unusually large. Further work with the gene has indicated that such defects may contribute to the unchecked cell growth that leads to cancer in people.
Other work has shed light on diseases from Alzheimer's to Zika, taught scientists about decisionmaking and circadian rhythms and helped researchers using them to win six Nobel Prizes. Over a century of tweaking fruit flies and cataloging the results has made Drosophila the most well-characterized animal model we have.
It's a big role for an unassuming bug. "When I try and tell people what I do, the first thing they usually say is, 'Why would you keep fruit flies alive? I try and kill them!' " Sylvester said.
The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center is the only institution of its kind in the U.S., and the largest in the world. It houses more than 77,000 different fruit fly strains. In 2019, the center shipped 204,672 vials of flies to labs in 49 states and 54 countries, said Annette Parks, one of the center's five principal investigators.
It is "one of the jewels we have in the community," said Pamela Geyer, a stem cell biologist.
Other model organisms can be frozen for long-term storage. But fruit flies can't go on ice. Caring for the creatures means regularly "flipping" them: transferring them from an old vial to a clean one that has been provisioned with food. Quarantined with other members of their strain, the flies mate and lay eggs, which hatch, pupate and reproduce, continuing the cycle.
"We have strains in our collection that have been continuously propagated like that since around 1909," across generations and institutions, said Cale Whitworth, another principal investigator.
The center employs 64 stockkeepers, a media preparator, a kitchen assistant and five dishwashing personnel. But as COVID-19 numbers rose, the co-directors developed a Hail Mary plan that, if absolutely necessary, would allow them to "keep most of the flies alive with just eight people," he said.
Tony Parkes, a biologist at Nipissing University in Ontario, said the stock center is an equalizer. It enables even small labs, he said, to tackle big questions "without requiring vast resources."
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