Flies and sleep and neuronal diseases -- review

Zordan MA, Sandrelli F. Circadian Clock Dysfunction and Psychiatric Disease: Could Fruit Flies have a Say? Front Neurol. 2015 Apr 20;6:80. PMID: 25941512; PMCID: PMC4403521.

From the abstract: "There is evidence of a link between the circadian system and psychiatric diseases. ... Disruption of clock genes and/or the clock network might be related to the etiology of these pathologies; also, some genes, known for their circadian clock functions, might be associated to mental illnesses through clock-independent pleiotropy. Here, we examine the features which we believe make Drosophila melanogaster a model apt to study the role of the circadian clock in psychiatric disease. ... We sum up current knowledge on behavioral endophenotypes, which are amenable to modeling in flies, such as defects involving sleep, cognition, or social interactions, and discuss the relationship of the circadian system to these traits. Finally, we consider if Drosophila could be a valuable asset to understand the relationship between circadian clock malfunction and psychiatric disease."

Review of Drosophila a model for neuropsychopharmacology-related research

Narayanan AS, Rothenfluh A. I Believe I Can Fly!: Use of Drosophila as a Model Organism in Neuropsychopharmacology Research. Neuropsychopharmacology. 2015 Oct 30. PMID: 26576740.

From the abstract:  "... Here, we outline why we study an invertebrate organism in the context of neuropsychiatric disorders, and we discuss how we can gain insight from studies in Drosophila. ... Highlighting some translational examples, we underline the fact that their brains works more like ours than one would have anticipated."

Their Fig. 1 provides a nice graphical summary of translational approaches.

Flies & Depression.

I did a search today at DIOPT-DIST with "major depressive disorder" (exact match). A long list of human genes identified through genome-wide association study (GWAS) or listed at Online Mendelian Inheritance in Man (OMIM) pop up in the search results. 

Below are genes with high-confidence DIOPT scores as of Nov. 2, 2012 (I'm noting the date because after future updates, the numbers and scores might change). I've opted to show here only the genes with DIOPT scores of seven or better--repeat the search with similar or looser criteria to find many additional putative orthologs of genes linked by GWAS or OMIM to depression. 

Of course it would be next to impossible to identify a "depressed" fly--a term that may not even be relevant to flies. But flies are not just useful to study diseases that can be recapitulated in comparable tissues, organs etc. and displaying phenotypes comparable to the human disease. Flies also useful to dissect interconnected genetic networks and signaling systems, which can be conserved in structure even when they're not regulating the same end outcomes.

FlyBaseID	Fly Symbol	Human GeneID	Human Symbol
FBgn0037094	CG7611	80232	WDR26
FBgn0037382	Hpr1	9984	THOC1
FBgn0033757	muskelin	4289	MKLN1
FBgn0000163	baz	56288	PARD3
FBgn0040777	CG14767	9741	LAPTM4A
FBgn0039169	CG5669	6671	SP4
FBgn0243513	cnir	29097	CNIH4
FBgn0001075	ft	79633	FAT4
FBgn0005671	Vha55	526	ATP6V1B2
FBgn0001991	Ca-alpha1D	775	CACNA1C
FBgn0030778	CG4678	1368	CPM
FBgn0010315	CycD	894	CCND2
FBgn0001104	G-ialpha65A	2773	GNAI3
FBgn0016983	smid	4931	NVL
FBgn0260964	Vmat	6570	SLC18A1