How do you think Fly contributes to the research community?
We are at the crossroads of many disciplines: physiology, evolution, developmental biology, immunity, ecology, pathology, neuroscience, genomics - to name only some. So we also have a special interest and responsibility to bring our science to much wider public attention: not just as a tool for curing diseases or inventing useful 'stuff', but as a crucial element of explaining 'the human condition'. Although we all tend to anthropomorphize a lot about our favourite experimental organism, such a device can also help us explain to the wider world why it's important to do what we do.
What are the current challenges facing the community?
The idea has taken root in some quarters that 'we don't need model organisms any more' because we can engineer any genome at will. However, I believe the opposite is true: to test any hypothesis about biology, we need to frame the question in a system or context sufficiently rich in content. So I predict that Drosophila as a model organism has hardly begun to come into its own. Studying flies is also far simpler, quicker, cheaper, more justifiable and usually more interpretable than using mammals. Nevertheless, the message needs to be constantly repeated and driven home. I see one of the challenges to the whole Fly community to make this case much more stridently to funders, editors, policymakers and the wider scientific community. Beyond that, we are all facing growing threats from populists, conspiracy theorists and those who reject scientific findings because they find them inconvenient, or counter to their perceived short-term interests. Perhaps we have inadvertently contributed to this by raising public expectations of what science can achieve for humanity, when the reality is of course a long painstaking slog to get to the truth and use it to address global problems. On both scores, we need to redress the balance.
What projects are you currently working on?
For the past 10 years or so, Howylab has been mainly focused on studying the alternative respiratory chain enzymes found in bacteria and in 'lower eukaryotes': in particular, transferring them to more complex organisms from which they have been lost during the course of evolution, i.e. flies, mammals and even human cells, and then using them as tools to investigate and potentially alleviate the consequences of mitochondrial dysfunction. But I have just had a new project funded, where we are following up our recent observation that mitochondria are much hotter than expected: indeed, over 10 ºC hotter than the rest of the cell. It's maybe not surprising that the hub of cellular energy metabolism should be hot. But the consequences of mitochondrial heat production and its potential biological significance are largely unexplored. We will be using Drosophila as the main system to address some of the issues arising: so right now I am recruiting skilled and motivated postdocs to take the project forward. Hopefully some are reading this right now and will get in touch.
