Figures
Diet-induced diabetes causes cardiac dysfunction in fruit flies.
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster—long used for studying mechanisms of cardiac development—has increasingly been employed to model human heart disease. In this issue, Na and colleagues combine dietary and genetic manipulation with physiologic characterization to establish an adult Drosophila model of chronic high sugar-induced heart disease, emphasizing the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway as a candidate therapeutic target. The image shows the normal sarcomeric structure of a Drosophila heart.
Image Credit: Jianbo Na and Ross Cagan, Mount Sinai School of Medicine.
Citation: (2013) PLoS Genetics Issue Image | Vol. 9(1) January 2013. PLoS Genet 9(1): ev09.i01. https://doi.org/10.1371/image.pgen.v09.i01
Published: January 31, 2013
Copyright: © 2013 Na, Cagan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
The fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster—long used for studying mechanisms of cardiac development—has increasingly been employed to model human heart disease. In this issue, Na and colleagues combine dietary and genetic manipulation with physiologic characterization to establish an adult Drosophila model of chronic high sugar-induced heart disease, emphasizing the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway as a candidate therapeutic target. The image shows the normal sarcomeric structure of a Drosophila heart.
Image Credit: Jianbo Na and Ross Cagan, Mount Sinai School of Medicine.