Published July 7, 2014 in the scientific journal Biology and Nature, Eureka Scientific News carried this recent article by John Pastor. In research supported by BSF, scientists with the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, the departments of Biological Sciences and of Fish and Wildlife Conservation at Virginia Tech, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and the Institute of Evolution at Haifa University, Israel team together. Said Pawel Michalak, an associate professor at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute, “We discovered a larger than expected amount of genetic variation between the fly populations and saw that the variation resulted in potentially functional differences in important biological processes, such as stress resistance and mating.” More than 65 percent of disease-causing genes in humans are believed to have functional counterparts in the fly, including many genes involved in certain cancers, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, heart disease, and other medical conditions. Read the full article here.
