Question: why does racing flies help you find out about how parkinsons disease makes brain cells die

Tora Smulders-Srinivasan answered on 10 Nov 2014:

I study flies that have the same problems as people with Parkinson’s have, so they also have trouble moving. So the Parkinson’s flies don’t do very well in a climbing assay — race.

In 10 seconds, only 1 or 2 of Parkinson’s flies out of 10 climb to the halfway point. For normal flies, 8 or 9 climb to the halfway point in 10 seconds.

So doing these races tells us about how well the flies move and probably is a good indicator of how many dead brain cells there are.

My experiments involve crossing in other defects with the Parkinson’s flies & I use the races to tell if these other defects in other proteins are involved with Parkinson’s.