Fly Eye

Flies are a nuisance, but they’re also an unexpected source of beauty. Here, we see the hexagonal units, called ommatidia, forming the eye in a fruit fly larva. Their precise honeycomb arrangement is vital for the eye disc to develop into a working adult eye. Scientists have studied this structure for over a century, making profound discoveries that carry through to human biology. Now, researchers have uncovered how the eye disc's pattern is maintained. An eye disc contains two layers of cells: retinal (pink and blue) and peripodal (blue). Each cell contains protein structures called adherens junctions (AJs), which connect the protein fibres of two cells' internal skeletons, like carabiners linking climbing ropes. Peripodal cells with faulty AJs pull on the retinal layer, disrupting the shape of the eye. Further understanding this process in fruit flies could help us tackle human diseases linked to faulty AJs, from inflammatory bowel disease to cancer.

Written by Henry Stennett

Henry Stennett

Writer

Henry is a science communicator at Cancer Research UK and a freelance writer. He used to research microbiology but now he’s got the writing bug.

• Image from work by Dana F. DeSantis and Scott J. Neal, and colleagues
• Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, Upstate Medical University, Syracuse, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in Biology Open, March 2023