Laboratory Animal and Comparative Medicine ›› 2025, Vol. 45 ›› Issue (6): 719-725.DOI: 10.12300/j.issn.1674-5817.2025.126

• Invertebrate Laboratory Animal: Fruit fly • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Evolutionary Conservation of Organ Development between Drosophila and Mammals

GAO Yinghao(), WU Wei()   

  1. Center for Excellence in Molecular Cell Science/Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry and Cell Biology, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China
  • Received:2025-07-25 Revised:2025-10-17 Online:2025-12-25 Published:2025-12-19
  • Contact: WU Wei

Abstract:

Drosophila, as a classic model organism, exhibits high evolutionary conservation with mammals in molecular regulatory networks, signal pathway transduction, and cell fate determination mechanisms involved in its organ development. Focusing on major organs of Drosophila including dorsal vessel (homologous to the mammalian heart), fat body and oenocytes (liver), Malpighian tubules and nephrocytes (kidney), and tracheal system (lung), this study deeply analyzes conservative characteristics in core regulatory pathways, key gene functions, and cellular behavioral patterns during organogenesis between Drosophila and mammals through multi-dimensional comparative analysis, clarifying the homologous basis of their developmental mechanisms. Integrating specific research examples, it further elaborates the application value of Drosophila in constructing models for human cardiovascular diseases, metabolic disorders, kidney diseases, and respiratory diseases, as well as its unique role in high-throughput screening of drug targets, analysis of disease pathogenic mechanisms, and improvement of the theoretical system of evolutionary developmental biology. The evolutionary conservation of core developmental regulatory mechanisms between Drosophila and mammals has built a key bridge from basic developmental research to human disease translation, providing important theoretical support and a technical platform for in-depth analysis of the molecular mechanisms of complex human diseases and development of novel therapeutic strategies, and holding great significance for promoting interdisciplinary integration of developmental biology and translational medicine.

Key words: Drosophila, Mammals, Organ development, Evolutionary conservation

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