Drosophila melanogaster, commonly known as the fruit fly, is one of the most studied organisms in the field of genetics. D. melanogasteris a tiny fly, only two to three millimeters in length and is often found around grapes and rotten bananas. They reproduce frequently, furnishing a new generation in less than two weeks; each generation includes hundreds of offspring. They are easy and inexpensive to maintain and easy to examine. Stable mutants will appear after a period of culture in the laboratory. All these characteristics make the fruit fly an ideal model for genetic studies.

In 1903, T. H. Morgan started his work on heredity and chromosomes using the fruit fly. In 1910, Morgan published his famous paper Sex Limited Inheritance in Drosophila in the journal Science that described a white-eyed male fruit fly mutant he observed and the crossing experiments he conducted in his laboratory. The...