For the special issue: Aging studies in Drosophila melanogaster

Following the success of the Special issue of Experimental Gerontology on “The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans in aging research”, this issue is dedicated to aging studies in Drosophila melanogaster. This issue comes at an auspicious time since 2010 marks 100 years of Drosophila research. In 1910 Thomas Hunt Morgan published a paper identifying the white gene entitled “Sex limited inheritance in Drosophila” (Morgan, 1910). Since then Drosophila has had a remarkable history of breakthroughs relevant to higher organisms and biology in general. Morgan’s paper marks the beginning of an era of groundbreaking research centered in his “Fly room” at Columbia, ultimately yielding the chromosome theory of inheritance and a Nobel Prize for Morgan in 1933. One of Morgans’ students, Hermann J. Muller, was awarded the Nobel price in 1946 for his work on X-ray mutagenesis and the discovery of the connection between radiation and lethal mutation in Drosophila. In 1995 Edward B. Lewis, Eric F. Wieshaus and Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard shared the Nobel Prize for discovering key developmental processes in the fly and the genes that control these processes (Lewis, 1978, Jurgens, et al., 1984). Analogous genes were found to play significant roles in the early development of mammals, illustrating unsuspected parallels between Drosophila and mammals. For instance, similar phenotypic characteristics mark developmental stages in Drosophila and mammals. The era of genomic scale biology has revealed many pathway conserved between Drosophila and mammals. It is likely there will be conservation of the aging process across these species, an argument more fully discussed throughout this issue.