Housefly
In science

The ease of culturing houseflies, and the relative ease of handling them when compared to the fruit fly Drosophila, have made them useful as model organism for use in laboratories. The American entomologist Vincent Dethier, in his humorous To Know A Fly (1962), pointed out that as a laboratory animal, houseflies did not trouble anyone sensitive to animal cruelty. Houseflies have a small number of chromosomes, haploid 6 or diploid 12. Because the somatic tissue of the housefly consists of long-lived postmitotic cells, it can be used as an informative model system for understanding cumulative age-related cellular alterations. Oxidative DNA damage 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine in houseflies was found in one study to increase with age and reduce life expectancy supporting the hypothesis that oxidative molecular damage is a causal factor in senescence (aging).

The housefly is an object of biological research, partly for its variable sex-determination mechanism. Although a wide variety of sex-determination mechanisms exists in nature (e.g. male and female heterogamy, haplodiploidy, environmental factors), the way sex is determined is usually fixed within a species. The housefly is, however, thought to exhibit multiple mechanisms for sex determination, such as male heterogamy (like most insects and mammals), female heterogamy (like birds), and maternal control over offspring sex. This is because a male-determining gene (Mdmd) can be found on most or all housefly chromosomes. Sexual differentiation is controlled, as in other insects, by an ancient developmental switch, doublesex, which is regulated by the transformer protein in many different insects. Mdmd causes male development by negatively regulating transformer. There is also a female-determining allele of transformer that is not sensitive to the negative regulation of Mdmd.

The antimicrobial peptides produced by housefly maggots are of pharmacological interest.

In the 1970s, the aircraft modeler Frank Ehling constructed miniature balsa-wood aircraft powered by live houseflies. Studies of tethered houseflies have helped in the understanding of insect vision, sensory perception, and flight control.
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