For Azusa Kamikouchi, a celebrated university professor who specializes in the auditory and brain mechanisms of flies, the common fruit fly can teach us a lot about the human brain.
Kamikouchi, 38, leads a team at Nagoya University that is researching fruit flies, or Drosophila melanogaster, to learn how sound signals are transmitted to their brains.
"Fruit flies are handy to study as they have been researched for more than a century and there is a lot of accumulated information about them," Kamikouchi said in one of the university's laboratories, surrounded by more than 2,000 test tubes, each containing some 100 fruit flies around 2 to 3 mm in size.