Episode details

Radio 4,03 Mar 2021,15 mins
Drosophila Melanogastronaut
Metamorphosis - How Insects Transformed Our WorldAvailable for over a year
Erica McAlister examines the innocuous flies that are Drosophila melanogaster. They’d be content to spend life doing nothing much more than hovering around a pile of rotting apples and getting drunk. But we now know more about these flies than any other animal on the planet, as a model for human biology and genetics - on earth and now in space. With contributions from : behavioural geneticist Prof. Matthew Cobb, University of Manchester; Dr. Stephanie Mohr, Harvard university and author of First in Fly; Sharmila Bhattacharya, NASA's chief scientist for Space Biology. Producer: Adrian Washbourne
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