By Erin Mussolum

IT’S LIKE magic. You return from the grocer with a wonderful assortment of summer fruit – and within minutes, pesky fruit flies appear and seemingly multiply before your eyes.

While they may be downright annoying, however, these insects are playing a critical role in research at Trinity Western University, giving scientists insight into two of our largest health concerns.

Dennis Venema, assistant professor of biology at TWU, uses fruit flies in his lab to investigate insulin signaling and cell surface proteins which physically connect cells together. By studying how cells work and how they multiply, Venema and his researchers are uncovering new information which will help lead to therapies for diabetes and cancer.

Venema and his assistants study the offspring of fruit flies with genetic deficiencies to discover how a mutant gene interrupts normal insulin signaling pathways in the young fruit flies.

“The most common form of diabetes, Type II diabetes, results from the inability of cells to respond to insulin,” says Venema. “The exact reasons why this is so, are unclear. A better understanding of how the genes in the insulin signaling pathway work together is needed, to address this question.”  

Why the common fruit fly? The creature’s DNA is very similar to that found in humans. And its short life cycle makes detailed genetic studies easier and faster than studies of larger creatures, such as mice or birds. 

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As well as diabetes research, Venema is also researching cancer and studying the fallout which occurs when organisms are no longer able to regulate their cell division. 

“When organisms lose the ability to control cell division, the resulting uncontrolled growth causes cancer,” he says. “Loss of cell-to-cell connections, or when the cell becomes detached from its tissue, often leads to uncontrolled growth as well.”

Venema has shown in his research that the same class of genes, thought to join cells together, actually do much more – and are required for coordinating the actions of individual cells to act together as a tissue.

Biology students attending TWU have the opportunity to contribute in the lab environment by performing cutting-edge, medically relevant research – which prepares them for graduate school or medical studies. 

A new High Resolution Microscopy and Live Imaging Laboratory that is being installed in the Biology Department at TWU will give Venema and his team even more opportunity to conduct this important research. 

Says Venema, “The hope of my research is first and foremost to better understand the genetics of how cells grow, divide and make connections with one another to form functional tissues. These processes are biologically fascinating in their own right, and highly relevant for understanding diseases like type II diabetes and cancer, among others.

“Over the long term, my hope is that this research, when combined with the efforts of other labs, will improve our ability to treat these diseases.”

September 2007