Feature
Thomas Kaufman, the Fly Guy
December 21, 2006
Renowned fruit fly researcher makes genetic breakthroughs studying one of the world's smallest insects
Thomas Kaufman's research on the fruit fly is helping to make medical breakthroughs in human disease.
The bumper sticker on Thomas Kaufman's office door says it all: “I brake for Drosophila.” More commonly known as the fruit fly, Drosophila is the foundation for the basic genetics research upon which Kaufman has built his academic career.
And what a career it is. A distinguished professor in the IU Bloomington Department of Biology, Kaufman is one of the world's foremost fruit fly researchers. As head of Indiana Genomics Initiative activities on the Bloomington campus, he studies the effects of induced genetic mutations. His laboratory works closely with IU's Drosophila Stock Center, a major source of fruit flies for researchers throughout the world. He is also adjunct professor of medical genetics at the IU School of Medicine.
But why are fruit flies so important? “Seventy-five percent of the known disease-causing genes found in humans are also in flies,” said Kaufman. “By studying the fruit fly, you'll understand human life and help alleviate human suffering.”
Others share his passion. In 2003, IU received a $2.7 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to establish the Drosophila Genome Research Center, the world's largest and most comprehensive center of its kind. Kaufman is one of three IU Bloomington researchers who administer the center.
IU Bloomington has long been the unofficial center of the fly world. The university hosts and maintains the ever-growing FlyBase, a massive database of Drosophila DNA sequence information, which in 2003 was approved for $20 million in continued funding from NIH. In 2006, the FlyBase Web site, flybase.org, was completely redesigned with a new interface and integrated database to maximize its functionality for researchers. Additionally, staff at the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center at IU breed, store, and distribute novel genetic strains of Drosophila to researchers who need flies for experiments. Kaufman estimates the center now sends out about 3,000 strains each week from the stock center's living library.
The “lowly” fruit fly, as Kaufman jokingly refers to the insect, has been a favorite of geneticists for nearly 100 years—longer than any other model organism in the history of genetics. Scientists like Kaufman have learned a great deal about how Drosophila genes work and interact and, by inference, how human and other organisms' genes function.
For example, Kaufman's research on the fruit fly's aging process could have important implications for people suffering from diseases that affect the brain. “The genes in the fly are the same as those involved in human diseases like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The similarities are absolutely stunning,” said Kaufman. “Studying model organisms is extremely important to the pharmaceutical industry and drug discovery.”
Kaufman acknowledges that the flies' relevance to humans has only become clear in recent years. “When I first started working with flies, there was no thought that they offered any direct comparisons to humans, much less anything close to a mammal,” said Kaufman, whose interest in Drosophila was sparked by a college job washing bottles in a fruit fly lab in the 1960s.
How times have changed. Now, the tiny fruit fly is helping to unlock the secrets to human genetics that could one day lead to medical breakthroughs—thanks to IU researchers like Thomas Kaufman.
“This is exciting stuff,” said Kaufman. “Students today are lucky to be alive. If you can imagine an experiment, you can do it.”
