The humble fruit fly – Drosophila melanogaster, to be specific – has played a central role in the history of genetics and molecular biology and continues to be important in research.
Championed by the legendary Thomas Morgan at the start of the 20th Century, Drosophila provided a practical foundation for genetics – long before the discovery of DNA as vehicle for passing down heritable information through generations. Morgan and colleagues developed the concepts of ‘gene’ and ‘linkage’, and so we have ‘Morgans’ (and more commonly, centi-Morgans, cM) as the basic units of genetic maps.