The zebrafish is a premier model organism for biomedical research, with a rich array of tools and genomic resources, and combining these with a fuller appreciation of wild zebrafish ecology could greatly extend its utility in biological research.
After decades of intensive research, D. melanogaster and its relatives could provide important tools for investigating future biological questions about human health and environmental change, but only if we better understand their natural history.
To leverage the tools, resources and knowledge that exist for C. elegans so that we can study ecology, evolution and other aspects of biology, we need to understand the natural history of this important model organism.
A combination of genetic, anatomical and physiological techniques has revealed that the lateral horn, a region of the brain involved in olfaction in flies, has many more types of neurons than expected.