- What was unusual about the white-eyed fly that appeared in Morgan's Drosophila colony in 1910?
Model Organisms
Species used as standard subjects of biological research.
- Why did Thomas Hunt Morgan choose Drosophila melanogaster for his inheritance experiments?
- Why did Beadle and Tatum choose bread mould as their experimental organism?
- How much did Muller's 1927 X-ray experiments increase the mutation rate in Drosophila?
- Why was Neurospora crassa well suited to Beadle and Tatum's genetics experiments?
- How did Beadle and Tatum use X-ray mutants of Neurospora crassa to link individual genes to specific enzymes?
- Why did bacteriophages become the model organism for early molecular biology?
- How does a SQUID exploit the Josephson effect to detect extremely faint magnetic fields?
- What did Cech observe in Tetrahymena thermophila that showed RNA could catalyze reactions without any protein present?
- What are homeotic genes, and what happens when they mutate?
- How did Nüsslein-Volhard and Wieschaus systematically map the genes controlling a fruit fly's body plan?
- How large was the international collaboration that sequenced the yeast genome, and how long did it take?
- Why was yeast a strategic choice as the first eukaryote to have its genome fully sequenced?
- What new kind of question could biologists ask once they had the complete yeast gene sequence in hand?
- What did Leland Hartwell discover about cell-cycle checkpoint genes working in yeast?
- Why did plant biologists choose Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism?
- What is a cell cycle checkpoint and what does it prevent from happening?
- What did Randy Schekman's work in yeast reveal about the genes controlling vesicle budding from the endoplasmic reticulum?
- Why did Sydney Brenner choose Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism for developmental biology?
- What physical traits define Mantophasmatodea, the heelwalkers, as a new insect order?
- Why had heelwalkers gone unrecognised for decades despite being present in museum specimens and amber?
- How rare is the formal recognition of a new insect order, and when had one last been described before 2002?
- How did Physarum polycephalum find the shortest path between food sources in a maze without a nervous system?
- How did researchers get a brainless slime mould to model a rail network?
- What does the slime mould experiment suggest about how simple organisms solve optimisation problems?
- How did the J. Craig Venter Institute team chemically synthesise an entire bacterial genome?
- What genes did Randy Schekman identify in yeast that control how vesicles are sorted to their destinations?
- How did starving yeast and screening mutants reveal the genes that control autophagy?