Many studies everyday over various environmental topics… you might be reading some of them every now and then, and seeing those we publish on our website. But, have you ever thought that a study would measure a fruit-fly’s diet?…
Dr. Laura Reed, UA assistant professor of biological sciences, studies obesity by experimenting on multiple generations of fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster. She and her colleagues fed some fruit fly larvae on a high-fat diet and a control group on a regular diet.
According to Phys.org, the significance of the research is that similar relationships between generational diet and obesity may hold true for humans as well.
How is this related to humans though?
“For flies—as has also been shown in humans and other systems—what their grandparents eat affects the descendants’ body weight,” Reed said.
“Two genetically identical flies that are raised on the same diet could have predictably different weights if one fly’s grandfather ate a high fat diet verses if the other fly’s grandmother ate a high-fat diet.”
What does the environment have to do with it?
Environment can change how genes express characteristics without changing the genetic code itself. The study implicates epigenetics, but much more study is necessary to fully understand how the effects are transmitted mechanistically, according to the researchers.
The current study shows that environment, the fatty diet, may change the phenotype of descendants, but it’s still too soon to generalize the findings to an entire population, or, for that matter, to human society. A link exists, but its strength is still debatable, given the influence of which grandparent got the high-fat diet.
The importance of this study is that it will allow scientists to find ways to prevent metabolic diseases, such as obesity.
