Fruit Flies hold the answer to getting slim.

I should point out that scoffing down a bowl of flies isn’t going to help you lose weight.  Other than the fact of course that you’ll very likely be ‘blowing-chunks’ for an hour afterwards.  Regardless,  scientists may have found a way to inhibit the way we store fat from studying these nasty little turd munchers.  So why aren’t we all slimmer than ‘Posh Spice‘ during lent? Well, we’re working on it.

All the fuss is about the set of genes belonging to the Drosophila Melanogaster, more commonly known as the Fruit Fly.  One of these genes has been dubbed the ’schlank’ (slim) gene by a group of German research scientists at the University of Bonn and it’s particularly interesting because it actively controls how the body metabolizes fat.

It’s been given the name schlank because, although the scientist whom discovers how a given gene functions is allowed to name it as they wish, the convention is that a gene be named on how it’s host looks if the gene is defective. As ridiculous as that seems, if the gene is defective, the fly looks slim; so they called it schlank.

So how does that help us then?  Well, we have a similar set of genes to the schlank gene, although we have six of them, called the lass genes, which up until now, we hadn’t connected with the metabolic regulation of lipids (fat in the body).  As you can imagine, discovering something as profound as this, the eager little Germans went to town!

Mice have almost identical lass genes to humans so, as you do, they used gene replacement therapy on a fruit fly with a defective schlank gene.  Normally, the fly would die soon after hatching but the flies treated with the lass gene lasted much longer.

Now, if the genes are so similar that the genes can be replaced like this then that opens the door to possible human applications.  Of course, this research is still very new and a lot of work will need to be done before human trials could begin but as Professor Hoch (Bonn University) puts it:

‘Due to the strong parallels with schlank we think such a function is very probable.  If this is the case they would be a promising approach for new medications for obesity.’