Fruit fly genes yielding clues to a deadly disease

By Tom Avril
Inquirer Staff Writer

The eyes of a fruit fly are among the miniature marvels of biology. Each one is divided into hundreds of tiny, bulbous units, arranged neatly in row upon row, giving it the honeycombed perfection of a piece of bubble wrap.

But something is wrong with the fly under Gillian Ritson's microscope. The sections of the insect's eyes are not in tidy rows, looking instead as if they've been tossed in a salad. The eyes are a pale, waxy color, not the usual red. Their hairy bristles are crazily askew.

Something is wrong with Ritson's fruit fly because she made it that way.

The fly is a mutant, bearing a defective gene that causes a deadly human disease in the same family as Alzheimer's. Ritson, 27, an Oxford-trained scientist who seeks her doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania, wants to know how the gene works so she can thwart the disease, both in flies and one day in humans, who share a surprising number of genetic similarities.

This month, Ritson and her supervisor, J. Paul Taylor, announced intriguing progress.

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