The fruit fly revolutionized biology. Now it’s boosting science in Africa

When Amos Abolaji returned to Nigeria from a yr overseas, he introduced house an odd memento — two jars stuffed with fruit flies.

The biochemist had been conducting postdoctoral analysis on the Federal College of Santa Maria in Brazil on the well being results of sure pollution. He had used laboratory rodents whereas engaged on his Ph.D. in Nigeria and wasn’t beforehand uncovered to the usage of fruit flies. However when Abolaji joined toxicologist Joao Batista Teixeira da Rocha’s lab in Brazil, “he informed me he stopped the usage of rodents for analysis.” Rocha had switched to utilizing the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.

After working with Rocha, Abolaji understood the fruit fly’s energy. “The fly has a excessive diploma of benefits in contrast with rodents, particularly in resource-limited areas,” Abolaji says. They’re low-cost, straightforward to boost, require little lab area and might carry quick outcomes — they usually’re poised to spice up biomedical analysis throughout Africa.

When Abolaji returned to Nigeria in 2014 and have become a professor on the College of Ibadan, he took his jars and transformed his workplace right into a miniature fly lab. He’s now a key determine in a rising motion to ascertain fruit fly analysis throughout Africa, the place rodents are nonetheless the go-to topic in research of genetics, developmental biology, toxicology and different fields of biomedical analysis.

In Africa, fruit fly research may help deal with pressing public well being wants, join native scientists with the worldwide analysis neighborhood and construct analysis capabilities internationally’s second-largest continent.

“We use [the fruit fly] as a instrument to have the ability to perform not simply analysis,” Abolaji says, “however to boost [the] subsequent era of scientists.”

The historical past of the fruit fly within the lab

Learning animals to realize insights into human biology and drugs goes again millennia, at the least way back to the traditional Greeks. By the twelfth century, Arab doctor Ibn Zuhr was testing surgical procedures on animals earlier than performing them on people. Within the mid-Nineteenth century, the Norway rat turned a mainstay of lab analysis as a result of the ever present pest was simply acquired and survived nicely in captivity.

The fruit fly didn’t enter the lab till 1900, when Harvard entomologist Charles Woodworth started breeding them en masse for causes that aren’t fully clear. He really helpful them to researchers learning genetics — a discipline nonetheless in its infancy on the time — and from there the potential of the fruit fly unfold by way of phrase of mouth.

The Drosophila growth took off in earnest round 1910, after Thomas Hunt Morgan arrange his well-known Fly Room at Columbia College. Cluttered with flasks stuffed with fruit flies and bunches of bananas dangling from the ceiling, the Fly Room hardly compares to the smooth and sterile labs of right now. However in that room, Morgan made the groundbreaking discovery that genes are handed right down to the subsequent era on chromosomes (SN: 2/7/22).

The fruit fly’s quick life cycle allowed the sector of genetics to take flight. Though rats reproduce quick for mammals — being pregnant is often 21 days and females attain sexual maturity two to a few months after beginning — they don’t have anything on fruit flies. They’ll produce a complete new era in simply 10 days. This, plus their small genomes, makes the fruit fly a strong instrument for learning how genes and traits are handed down from one era to the subsequent (SN: 5/17/19).

Drosophila are additionally used to review how embryos turn into adults and to check the organic results of chemical compounds. (As a result of rodents are much more intently associated to people, they continue to be well-liked mannequin organisms for learning mammal-specific traits and in scientific drug testing.) Over the past century, 9 scientists have received Nobel Prizes primarily based on work carried out with fruit flies.

Abolaji’s Drosophila lab is in Ibadan, the third-most populous metropolis in Nigeria and capital of the southwestern state of Oyo. After I reached him over Zoom, he offered a slide present of his historical past with Drosophila. “I believed it could be good if I simply share it like a narrative,” he informed me.

A number of years after bringing fruit flies again from Brazil in 2014, Abolaji was approached by DrosAfrica, a corporation based in 2013 to increase the usage of Drosophila by African biologists. A trio of Spanish researchers began DrosAfrica after a workshop in Uganda on utilizing bugs in neuroscience analysis. Physiologist Sadiq Yusuf, who was then the deputy vice chancellor of Kampala Worldwide College and later went on to discovered a charity supporting analysis improvement in Africa known as TReND, had organized the workshop.

He made many important contributions, together with discovering that embryonic cells cluster collectively primarily based on what anatomical construction they turn into, with their destiny managed by sure genes. García-Bellido, it’s been mentioned, “put Spain on the scientific map.”

The Spanish group had acknowledged that African researchers have been primed to make use of fruit flies to speed up the continent’s analysis, which is what had occurred in Spain a couple of many years earlier.

From Morgan’s Fly Room, D. melanogaster unfold rapidly to different analysis labs in North America and Europe. However not each nation caught fly fever. In Spain, nearly nobody labored with the fruit fly till Antonio García-Bellido returned to his native nation after ending a analysis fellowship at Caltech within the Seventies. As soon as house, the developmental biologist established a Drosophila lab.

“Then he skilled three individuals, after which these three individuals skilled different individuals,” says María (Lola) Martín-Bermudo, a geneticist at Pablo de Olavide College in Seville and a DrosAfrica cofounder. “Now there are many Drosophila labs in Spain.”

To leap-start an analogous unfold of data in Africa, Abolaji and DrosAfrica organized a workshop on the College of Ibadan in 2017, which introduced in skilled fruit fly researchers from so far as Spain and the UK to show attendees Drosophila biology and the way the fruit fly can be utilized to review neurodegeneration, most cancers and toxicology, in addition to assist with drug discovery. “That workshop was one of many main turning factors in my analysis,” Abolaji says.

The workshop hosted individuals from elsewhere in Africa, together with Uganda, Rwanda and Ghana. One participant, a younger lady from northern Nigeria named Rashidatu Abdulazeez, traveled 18 hours over two days to attend.

Assembly Africa’s pressing public well being wants

Lengthy earlier than arriving at that workshop, Abdulazeez had already develop into hooked on fruit flies. However she didn’t have a jar of flies from one other lab to begin her work — she needed to catch them herself.

She’d learn that the flies might be trapped outdoor, however nothing she tried had labored. Whereas incomes a grasp’s diploma in inhabitants genetics, Abdulazeez stayed together with her auntie whereas making an attempt to catch flies within the metropolis of Kaduna in northwestern Nigeria. “[Perhaps] they don’t wish to keep removed from people,” her auntie prompt.

Considering the flies may desire human trash to different lures, Abdulazeez unnoticed a bowl of rotten fruit in a single day. “I had a dream that I caught a lot of Drosophila,” Abdulazeez recollects with amusing. Within the morning, her dream had come true.

In 2016, after fixing the fly-catching downside, she revealed an evaluation of the genetic variation of Nigeria’s D. melanogaster populations.

Like Abolaji, Abdulazeez needed to study loads about Drosophila on her personal. However it was price it. “I started to fall in love [with fruit flies] as a result of I used to be simply so amazed by the truth that we had a lot in widespread,” she says, referring to the 60 p.c of our DNA that we share with fruit flies. And importantly, 75 p.c of the genes that trigger illness in people are additionally discovered within the flies.

Abdulazeez is now a lecturer (akin to a professor) at her alma mater, Ahmadu Bello College in Zaria. Towards the tip of our video name, she took me into the hallway as she headed to a gathering and identified the poster on her lab’s door: a black-and-white picture of a fruit fly peering by way of a microscope, with the phrases “Small Lab Huge Science” blazoned throughout the highest.

The “Huge Science” advantages of Drosophila as a mannequin organism stem from not solely its similarities to us, but additionally its key variations, like being straightforward to take care of. Beginning a Drosophila lab can require as little as a jar of flies and a handful of microscopes, whereas a colony of lab rats can take up a complete room’s price of cages. The benefit of utilizing fruit flies is a big boon for a continent with many native public well being considerations however little native analysis funding.

“I want to hold out analysis that can have helpful results on people,” Abolaji says. Some pollution within the setting can predispose individuals to most cancers, diabetes, Parkinson’s illness and a complete host of different afflictions, he says, and he makes use of fruit flies to know why.

One pollutant that Abolaji has studied is 4-vinylcyclohexene, a by-product of the manufacturing of pesticides, plastics and tires. Plastic manufacturing has been rising in Nigeria, from 120,000 tons in 2007 to an estimate of greater than 500,000 tons in 2020, which means increasingly more staff are probably being uncovered to VCH. In monkeys and rats, VCH is understood to destroy follicles in ovaries, so there’s concern that publicity may trigger early menopause in people.

“A girl that’s working in an setting the place such compounds are manufactured or produced or used as by-­merchandise, [who is] supposed to succeed in menopause at 56, could attain menopause at 30 or 35,” Abolaji says.

However how VCH harms ovarian follicles was elusive. Abolaji acquired a touch by exposing Drosophila to VCH and analyzing the ensuing modifications within the fruit fly’s gene exercise and physiology. The chemical causes the manufacturing of poisonous sorts of oxygen-­containing molecules referred to as free radicals, which injury cells.

In Tunisia, Hayet Sellami hopes to leverage the ability of fruit flies to create a drug-screening manufacturing facility, dashing up the method of figuring out new medical therapies. Sellami, a medical physician and researcher, says her journey with Drosophila started with a pair of workshops in 2018 and 2019 hosted by her establishment, the College of Sfax, and arranged by DrosAfrica and knowledgeable community of scientists known as Younger Tunisian Researchers in Biology. Impressed by the workshops, college directors permitted making a Drosophila analysis unit.

“Our analysis unit is the primary [in Tunisia] to make use of Drosophila as a low-cost mannequin for analysis,” Sellami says. She hopes to start fruit fly analysis in earnest this yr, and as soon as the lab is absolutely up and working, researchers will have the ability to rapidly display screen potential medication by testing them on fruit flies. If a drug appears promising, the subsequent step might be assessments on rodents. Utilizing Drosophila as a primary move for medication will save beneficial money and time that might in any other case be spent elevating and caring for costly rats and mice.

Considered one of Sellami’s pursuits is utilizing the flies to check potential antifungal medication. “This [is] a very good alternative to reinforce our college and to have sensible analysis,” she says, and result in “higher well being take care of our individuals.”

In a 2022 research, 63 p.c of the fungus Candida albicans collected from pregnant Tunisian ladies’s vaginas was immune to the widespread antifungal drug fluconazole. C. albicans is usually innocent, however it could possibly trigger yeast infections that may result in uncommon being pregnant issues. So discovering new antifungal medication is a urgent concern.

Boosting fruit fly analysis throughout Africa

The College of Sfax is following within the footsteps of the College of Ibadan, the place the small fly lab Abolaji based in 2014 has blossomed into the separate Drosophila Analysis and Coaching Centre. It serves as a regional hub for scientists considering working with fruit flies. Sellami hopes that Sfax turns into a hub for North Africa. By investing in fruit fly analysis, African establishments additionally now have the prospect to affix the enduring insect’s international fan membership.

Biologist Ross Cagan of the College of Glasgow in Scotland was one of many Drosophila researchers recruited by DrosAfrica to run workshops. He now collaborates with each Abolaji and Sellami on medical analysis that not solely has well being implications for Africans however for individuals globally.

“My lab develops some expertise we name ‘fly avatar,’” Cagan says. Utilizing gene enhancing, particular genetic mutations of particular person most cancers sufferers are launched into fruit flies. The objective is to seize the complexity of a affected person’s most cancers in a bunch of Drosophila flies to review how these mutated genes have an effect on tumor development and the way the most cancers responds to medication.

“One of many questions on the desk is, what’s the distinction between a European tumor and an African tumor?” Cagan says. Abolaji’s group is producing fly avatars that mimic the genetics of Nigerian sufferers with colorectal most cancers.

Abolaji is “any person that the extra you get to know him, the extra spectacular he turns into,” Cagan says. “That collaboration goes fantastically. It’s really rising out of Nigeria.”

The largest cash for analysis nonetheless lies in Western establishments, and writing grants to get the funding for bold initiatives is tough even for scientists in North America and Europe. Western collaborators may help African researchers navigate this path. Sellami just lately submitted a proposal to Horizon Europe, a seven-year funding initiative of the European Union, in collaboration with Cagan to help Sfax’s analysis into customized drugs with fly avatars. Sellami and Abolaji have additionally teamed as much as submit a proposal to a different EU funding initiative, Erasmus+.

One factor that makes these worldwide collaborations stand out is that African scientists are guiding the analysis questions, says Marta Vicente-Crespo, cofounder of DrosAfrica and a program supervisor on the Nairobi-based Consortium for Superior Analysis Coaching in Africa. Usually in such collaborations, African researchers get what’s been dubbed “caught within the center.” They could gather information, however not analyze or interpret it, whereas Western scientists lead the undertaking and declare the extra prestigious first and final authorship spots on papers.

“There was numerous tokenization,” Vicente-Crespo says. “Issues are altering, however very slowly.”

The legacy of colonization has left many areas of Africa with little capital, which implies college students trying to do analysis typically must fund the initiatives themselves. “We don’t have funding,” Abdulazeez says. “Once you come for any of your levels, you principally sponsor your self.” As a result of rodents are costly, college students typically can’t afford to make use of many, leading to research with low pattern sizes and thus conclusions that aren’t dependable sufficient to publish.

“They get their diploma, however the science doesn’t go anyplace,” Vicente-Crespo provides.

Through the use of Drosophila, cash that may have gone to feeding a couple of rodents for a number of weeks can as a substitute flip into hundreds of fruit flies. Abdulazeez estimates that one mouse prices about 1,000 naira, the Nigerian forex; shopping for 80 of them would value greater than many Nigerians make in a month.

A fruit fly homecoming

There’s a poetic aspect to D. melanogaster’s rise in African analysis — like people, the fruit fly developed in Africa earlier than spreading all over the world. Although they got here to dominate the globe by way of an affiliation with people — dwelling off our meals waste — they as soon as lived extra pastoral lives. Researchers in 2018 discovered a inhabitants of D. melanogaster dwelling in a forest in Zimbabwe, unaffiliated with people. These flies fed and laid their eggs on the fruit of marula crops. The Indigenous San individuals of southern Africa traditionally collected marula fruit and saved them in caves, the place the fruit fermented. Researchers speculate that this shared use of marula in the end sparked the human-fly connection that persists to this present day.

Abdulazeez is most passionate in regards to the ecology and evolution of fruit flies. For now, although, because the chief of a brand new analysis group, she’s specializing in extra pressing well being issues — like lead poisoning — and on inspiring the subsequent era of Nigerian biologists. “We nonetheless have people who find themselves but to just accept the truth that we may use these flies for great issues,” she says.

To fight this downside, she based Droso4Nigeria, a corporation that works to carry Drosophila-based biology classes into Nigerian secondary colleges and trains academics to make use of the fruit fly within the classroom.

Abolaji additionally stresses the significance of training and coaching. “The last word objective is to boost and develop the subsequent era of scientists in Africa,” he says.

Whereas worldwide grants and collaborations are essential, the continuing success of Africa’s Drosophila-fueled analysis growth wouldn’t be attainable with out the fervour, expertise and resourcefulness of the African scientists main the way in which. Throughout our video name, Abolaji confirmed me the temperature-controlled incubator he makes use of to boost flies; a brand new one can value upward of $10,000, however Abolaji long-established his out of an outdated drink chiller (the sort you’d pull a bottle of soda from on the grocery retailer) for lower than $500.

“Europe won’t develop Africa for us. America won’t develop Africa for us,” Abolaji says. “We’re those to really construct Africa.”