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Pretty ‘fly’ for a fruit fly

Reading Time: 4 minutes   Dr Frank Hirth is one of the world’s leading fruit fly MND researchers. Based at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London, he has been working on an Association-funded project developing a C9orf72 fruit fly model of MND. Here we mark the end of this project, and report on what the…

The C9orf72 mystery begins to unravel even more of its secrets

Reading Time: 4 minutes In 2011 an international team of scientists, including three MND Association-funded researchers, identified the elusive C9orf72 gene located on Chromosome 9. Since this ground-breaking discovery, researchers from around the world have been trying to find a way to open-up and reveal more about this MND-causing gene. Determined to get inside and unravel the secrets behind…

Come fly with me

Reading Time: 3 minutes Although millions of years of evolution separate humans from insects, a tiny fruit fly called Drosophila melanogaster has been one of the most extensively studied organisms for more than a century, leading to many advances in research. But why are flies so useful? And can we really learn anything from them? Why fly? It is…