Biology Word List

November 2006 — Fighting like a girl or fighting like a boy is hardwired into fruit fly neurons, according to a study in the Nov. 19 Nature Neuroscience advance online publication by a research team from Harvard Medical School and the Institute of Molecular Pathology in Vienna.

"Aggression is a very serious problem in society, and it's a problem with a biological and genetic component," said co-author Edward Kravitz, the George Packer Berry professor of neurobiology at HMS, who developed the fruit fly fighting model used.

"Drosophila have marvelous advantages in terms of genetic tricks," she said, "and flies in many respects behave and respond similarly to humans."

More generally, he said, such studies form a potential bridge between systems neuroscience studies of behavior and modern molecular neuroscience research into individual neurons and synapses

The findings provide a welcome guidepost to help enable future research to track down the underlying neural circuitry, said Bruce Baker, a biology professor at Stanford who first linked the fruitless gene to male-specific courtship behavior.

Meanwhile, co-author Steven Nilsen, a postdoctoral fellow in Kravitz's lab, had similar questions and was staging contests between another line of mutant fruitless flies without such clear brain-switching genetics.

Males prefer lunges; they rear up on their back legs and snap their forelegs down hard -- sometimes nailing an opponent that is slow to retreat.