Fruit flies for space research

A close up of three fruit flies, used for scientific research both on Earth and in space. 

Findings from a study using fruit flies on the International Space Station suggest that space travel has an impact on the central nervous system, but that artificial gravity provides partial protection against those changes.

Fruit flies are the ideal organism for this kind of research due to their similarities to humans. There’s a significant amount of overlap between the cellular and molecular processes of flies and humans.

Almost 75% of the genes that cause disease in humans are shared by fruit flies, meaning the more we learn about fruit flies, the more information scientists have to investigate how the space environment may impact human health.

Flies also have much shorter lifespans – about two months and reproduce in two weeks. The three weeks the flies spend in space is equivalent to about three decades of a human’s life, giving scientists more biological information in a shorter time span.