How Insecs 'Remodel' Their Bodies Between Life Stages

       How can an insect remake itself so completely that that it appears to be a different creature altogether, not just once but several times in a lifetime? A team led by Ian and Dianne Ducan of Washington University  are working with fruit flies rather than butterflies. The fruit flies go through 3 main stages: the larva, the pupa, and the adult. In earlier work it had shown that larva and adult forms are patterned by the same "signaling systems," that transfer a signal from receptor on the surface of cells to target genes within cell nuclei. But what they did not understand is how the same signaling system can form the larva in one case and the adult fly in the other. They were then able to show that a gene expressed only in the pupal stage redirects genes than in earlier stages. This gene itself controlled by a steroid hormone that turns on many other genes as well.

      I found this article very interesting because it shows how genes are being turned on like for example how this one gene can do this difficult process of changing the flies. I really enjoyed reading this article because we find flys so annoying but at the same time they are very unique because of there different stages of transformation.