BY JUDY LIN-EFTEKHAR
UCLA Today Staff
When it comes to scientific breakthroughs,
consider the lowly fruit fly. Kitchen pests to the rest of us,
for researchers like Lawrence Zipursky, the diminutive members
of the genus Drosophila constitute a scientist’s gold
mine, promising to reveal secrets about the nature of life and
even pave the way to cures for human disease.
This hasn’t always been the case. While
fruit flies have been under the microscope for more than a century
in genetics research, Zipursky noted, “The belief that
a fruit fly could really tell you something about human biology
was for many years an issue of faith.”
Professor of biological chemistry and a Howard
Hughes Medical Institute investigator, Zipursky works out of
a fifth-floor lab swarming with test tube vials and bottles
of flies in various degrees of cultivation in the MacDonald
Medical Research Laboratories on south campus.
In the past decade, faith in the fly is being
replaced by fact as Zipursky and colleagues around the world
have discovered stunning parallels between fruit flies and human
beings.
“One of the really remarkable developments
is finding how similar basic processes — cellular, mental
and neurobiological processes — are between fruit flies
and mammals,” Zipursky said. “What we find in this
modest little fly is going to be relevant all the way up to
humans.”
Chosen by the Academic Senate to deliver the
93rd Faculty Research Lecture Jan. 29, Zipursky will share what
he has learned with the campus community in “Building
the Brain: How Nerve Connections are Formed During Develop-ment,”
at 3 p.m. in The Anderson School’s Korn Convocation Hall.
Zipursky developed his passion for research
during his summers off from Oberlin College, when he worked
at a lab that used genetics to study bacterial viruses and E.
coli.
“It was just about this time —
the mid-1970s — that recombinant DNA technology was beginning,
and I loved it,” he recalled. He received his Ph.D. in
molecular biology from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in
New York, then did postdoctoral work in neurogenetics at Caltech.
Zipursky focuses his research on the fruit
fly’s visual system to pursue fundamental questions about
how brain neurons form the extraordinarily complex and precise
networks of synapses that make up the neural circuits’
underlying behavior.
In painstaking work, he and his research team
have made sense of some portions of the fruit fly’s 250,000
or so neurons. Using isolated fruit fly mutants, they have identified
many genes, along with the cell surface proteins they encode,
that regulate the neuronal connections throughout the brain.
What’s more, they have found that many of these proteins
are closely related to proteins in humans, which suggests that
they play similar roles in wiring the human brain.
“This is really an adventure,”
Zipursky said. “We’re in the thick of the problem,
and it’s great fun.”
