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Published online 7 November 2007 | Nature 450, 142-143 (2007) | doi:10.1038/450142a
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Attack of the genomes
How many genome sequences do you need to characterize a model organism? For Drosophila, Heidi Ledford finds, a dozen is a good start.
There was a time not so long ago when sequencing a single genome was cause for celebration. If that genome was from a eukaryote, so much the better.
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Now with the establishment of Drosophila as a genetic model organism to study brain and behaviour (Nature 450, 173, 2007; Nature 450, 193, 2007), it is time that we begin to fully exploit the fly towards understanding neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases and developing drugs against these disorders. This will however require that we move beyond individual genes and dissect fly brain at systems level. Consider epileptogenesis, i.e., development of epilepsy, for example. Seizure in fly and man have several similarities, and the utility of the fruit fly as a genetic model system for studying human seizure disorders and seizure-susceptibility has clearly been demonstrated. The problem is that available antiepileptic drugs are symptomatic in that in they inhibit seizure but do not modify the course of or prevent epileptogenesis. At present, epileptogenesis is poorly understood in cellular and molecular terms. A system-level understanding of epilepsy development - a network problem that may involve molecular, structural, and functional alterations in the brain - would facilitate development of novel antiepileptogenic (prophylactic) therapy. Since inherent complexity of mammalian brain does not render the available rodent models of epileptogenesis as amenable to reiterative methods of systems modeling, developing a systems model of epileptogenesis-like plasticity in Drosophila will be of great value here. Given the promise of systems modeling in brain plasticity related disorders and drug discovery, I strongly feel that undertaking a community project for creating an interactive genome-wide image database of gene expression in the fly brain, on the lines of ‘Allen Brain Atlas’ of mouse brain (http://www.brain-map.org/welcome.do) funded by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen (Science 313, 1879, 2006), would go a long way in bridging the gap between Drosophila basic neurogenetic research and its potential application in human health.