Introduction

 Drosophila is one of the major organisms for the study of genetics, evolution, and population biology. It has been used to discover the fact that genes were related to proteins and the study of genetic inheritance rules. In more recent studies, it was used for developmental biology and how such a complex organism arises from a simple fertilized egg. Most of the attention has been focused on embryotic development but there are also interests in some adult structures develop in the pupa such as the compound eye, wings, legs, and other organs. It has been used for research for almost 100 years, and now, many scientist are interested and researching on the many different aspects of Drosophila. According to Genetics-gsa.org, there have been many awards granted towards this research. It had won the Nobel prize in medicine/physiology to Ed Lewis, Christane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus in 1995. Drosophila was the perfect organism to research toward human health. We already know so much about this tiny organism- it has a short life cycle of two weeks, it is easy to understand and handle, it doesn't costs a large amount of money to get our hands on, and it's easy to keep large numbers.

Because they are a model organism of many aspects of biology, these flies and the entire genome have recently been fully sequenced. There are 12 fully sequenced species, such as Drosophila psuedoobscura, D. persimilis, D. willistoni, D. mojavensis, and D. virilis to name a few. This data has used to correlate evolutionary genome comparisons.

The species I had chosen is Drosophila virilis.

It has been said that D. virilis originated somewhere in the ancient deciduous forest of China or arid regions, and remained isolated from the rest of the species. This species live near the watersides. In north and in high altitudes, these species have only on generation a year. They are larger than many of the other Drosophila species. They are dark colored, male tends to have a red abdomen, and they do not have sex combs in their front legs. They also have cross-veins on their wings and even larger cross-veins around it along the shadow. The females are able to recognize species-specific characters of the male song, but with this type of species they do not need to hear the song before mating. They also have a high thermotolerance and a high tolerance for ethanol, allowing them to adapt and survive in many different environments.