DALLAS: Take one ordinary fruit fly… add one ingenious robot… and you have the necessary items for one of the most unique breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease research.
Scientists are combining high-tech robotics, computing, biology, and physics to gain new insights into the factors behind the debilitating neurological disease.
And they’re using the common fruit fly to do it.
While we mostly curse these pesky insects for munching through our fruit, humans actually have a lot in common with fruit flies when it comes to genetic makeup. In fact, over half of the genes known to trigger or affect human diseases are common in fruit flies, too…