When ancestral humans walked out of Africa tens of thousands
of years ago, Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies came along with them. Now the
fruit flies, widely used for genetics research, are returning to Africa and
establishing new populations alongside flies that never left — offering new
insights into the forces that shape genetic variation.
That's one of the findings from two new papers published
this month by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and their
colleagues that describe the genomes of almost 200 strains of the tiny flies.