IMAGES OF SCIENCE
The geneticists’ guinea pig
© Sophie Desset/Chantal Vaury/INSERM
The Drosophila melanogaster (or fruit fly) is a model organism for researchers, who are using it in their work on Parkinson’s and Huntingdon’s diseases and elsewhere. Its genome has been sequenced since 1998. In this photograph the ovaries form a set of functional units, the ovarioles. Each ovariole is a chronological sequence of follicles developing along an axis, like a string of beads of increasing size.