Integrative Biology Seminar - Sarah Ruckman, Postdoctoral Fellow

A Simple Developmental Trait as a Genetic Entry Point into Complex Behavioral Variation in Drosophila

Sarah Ruckman is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Long Lab at the University of California, Irvine. Behavioral disorders cost the United States roughly $282 billion a year in healthcare and lost productivity. Current medications work modestly at best and can carry severe, unpredictable side effects. Doctors prescribe by trial and error because we lack a genetic understanding of why one drug helps one patient and fails another.
Sarah works on closing that gap. In her postdoctoral research in Tony Long's lab at UC Irvine, she use Drosophila melanogaster to find genes that alter behavior. Sarah focuses on pupation height, the height at which a fly larva chooses to pupate before metamorphosis. It may sound like a strange place to start, but this simple trait is heritable, easy to measure at scale, and many of the neural circuits are conserved between flies and humans.

For more information about Sarah's research and the Long Lab, please visit https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/longlab/.

This event is free and open to the public.