Trembling Legs

Brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease and spinocerebellar ataxia affect people’s movements, causing problems with walking and creating characteristic trembling shaking known as tremors. In order to understand more about what’s going on as these diseases develop and how best to treat them, researchers have turned to tiny genetically-modified fruit flies, which recreate the underlying biological problems that cause these diseases. And it turns out that these insects also have the same movement problems seen in patients. Using clever image analysis software, researchers can now automatically track and compare leg movements in flies that mimic different brain disorders. They’ve found that flies simulating Parkinson’s disease (right) and spinocerebellar ataxia (middle) have distinctive but different movements patterns compared with normal insects (left), providing a useful tool for studying these diseases in greater depth to understand what’s gone wrong, and providing a new way of testing the effects of novel therapies.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from work by Shuang Wu and colleagues
• Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology, Agency for Science, Technology and Research, Singapore
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, June 2019