But because mammals gestate their young inside the body, it is very difficult to follow key developmental steps. So studying fruit flies, technically known as Drosophila melanogaster , can tell us about our own development, Kiehart said. Kiehart and his colleagues are zeroing in on how and why cells move during development. He wants to identify which genes are crucial for normal movements and cell shape changes during development, and why, when gene products don't function at the right time, birth defects can result. One key protein, he says, is non-muscle myosin, a kind of molecular motor that drives changes in cell shape and powers cell movements as a fertilized fly egg grows and develops legs, eyes, wings and all its other body parts.
Scientists also know that myosin is vital to daily cell maintenance in both flies and people.
Kiehart has already identified one type of non-muscle myosin that, when missing in flies, results in a defect in the way cells change shape, comparable to spina bifida in people. By watching the fate of the glowing cells in his experimental flies, Kiehart and his colleagues have already confirmed some of their previous hypotheses about cell movement during dorsal closure. They also have provided a powerful tool for other researchers studying development, because the glowing protein is also concentrated in the developing eye, nervous system, the forming gut, the sensory organs, and particularly, the leading edges of migrating cells in all organ systems. Kiehart and his lab group are expanding the use of this glowing protein to help find out how skin cells move to cover an open wound. He has begun experiments to put the glowing protein in human and mouse skin cells in laboratory dishes.