Rewired for Romance: Scientists Give Gift-Giving Behavior to Singing Fruit Flies

In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Science, researchers from Japan have successfully transferred a unique courtship behavior from one species of fruit fly to another. By activating a single gene in insulin-producing neurons, the team made Drosophila melanogaster, a species that typically sings “courtship songs,” perform a gift-giving ritual it had never done before.

The study reveals that the reason for this difference lies in the connection between insulin-producing neurons and the courtship control center in the brain. In gift-giving flies (D. subobscura), these cells are connected, while in singing flies (D. melanogaster), they remain disconnected. This discovery highlights that the evolution of novel behaviors does not necessarily require the emergence of new neurons; instead, small-scale genetic rewiring can lead to behavioral diversification and species differentiation.

The researchers inserted DNA into D. subobscura embryos to create flies with heat-activated proteins in specific brain cells. They used heat to activate groups of these cells and compared the brains of flies that did and did not regurgitate food. The study identified 16-18 insulin-producing neurons that make the male-specific protein FruM, clustered in a part of the brain called the pars intercerebralis.

“Our findings indicate that the evolution of novel behaviors does not necessarily require the emergence of new neurons; instead, small-scale genetic rewiring in a few preexisting neurons can lead to behavioral diversification and, ultimately, contribute to species differentiation,” said Dr. Yusuke Hara, co-lead author from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT).

This study demonstrates how scientists can trace complex behaviors like nuptial gift-giving back to their genetic roots to understand how evolution creates entirely new strategies that help species survive and reproduce.

The research was conducted with support from KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research and has been published in the journal Science on August 14, 2025.

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have made a groundbreaking discovery that combines bacteria and viruses to create an innovative cancer treatment approach. In a recent study published in Nature Biomedical Engineering, the Synthetic Biological Systems Lab presents a system called CAPPSID (Coordinated Activity of Prokaryote and Picornavirus for Safe Intracellular Delivery). This technology leverages the tumor-seeking abilities of Salmonella typhimurium bacteria to deliver viruses directly into cancerous cells.

The approach bridges bacterial engineering with synthetic virology, allowing the bacteria to act as a Trojan horse by ferrying the virus past the body’s immune system and releasing it inside the tumor. The researchers believe that this technology represents the first example of engineered cooperation between bacteria and cancer-targeting viruses.

One of the biggest hurdles in oncolytic virus therapy is the body’s defense system, which can neutralize the virus before it reaches a tumor. The Columbia team sidestepped this problem by hiding the virus inside the tumor-seeking bacterium, making it invisible to circulating antibodies.

The CAPPSID system combines the bacteria’s instinct for homing in on tumors with the virus’s knack for infecting and killing cancer cells. By exploiting these characteristics, the researchers created a delivery system that can penetrate the tumor and spread throughout it, overcoming the limitations of both bacteria- and virus-only approaches.

A key concern with any live virus therapy is controlling its spread beyond the tumor. The team’s system solved this problem by making sure the virus couldn’t spread without a molecule it can only get from the bacteria. Since the bacteria stay put in the tumor, this vital component isn’t available anywhere else in the body.

The researchers believe that this technology has significant potential for future clinical applications and are currently testing the approach in a wider range of cancers using different tumor types, mouse models, viruses, and payloads. They are also evaluating how this system can be combined with strains of bacteria that have already demonstrated safety in clinical trials.

As a physician-scientist, Jonathan Pabón’s goal is to bring living medicines into the clinic, and efforts toward clinical translation are currently underway to translate the technology out of the lab. The team has filed a patent application related to this work and is looking ahead to developing a “toolkit” of viral therapies that can sense and respond to specific conditions inside a cell.

This publication marks a significant step toward making bacteria-virus systems available for future clinical applications, and it is systems like these – specifically oriented towards enhancing the safety of living therapies – that will be essential for translating advances into the clinic.

The accelerated evolution engine known as T7-ORACLE has revolutionized the field of medicine and biotechnology by allowing researchers to evolve proteins with new or improved functions at an unprecedented rate. This breakthrough was achieved by Scripps Research scientists who have developed a synthetic biology platform that enables continuous evolution inside cells without damaging the cell’s genome.

Directed evolution is a laboratory process where mutations are introduced, and variants with improved function are selected over multiple cycles. Traditional methods require labor-intensive steps and can take weeks or more to complete. In contrast, T7-ORACLE accelerates this process by enabling simultaneous mutation and selection with each round of cell division, making it possible to evolve proteins continuously and precisely inside cells.

T7-ORACLE circumvents the bottlenecks associated with traditional approaches by engineering E. coli bacteria to host a second, artificial DNA replication system derived from bacteriophage T7. This allows for continuous hypermutation and accelerated evolution of biomacromolecules, making it possible to evolve proteins in days instead of months.

To demonstrate the power of T7-ORACLE, researchers inserted a common antibiotic resistance gene into the system and exposed E. coli cells to escalating doses of various antibiotics. In less than a week, the system evolved versions of the enzyme that could resist antibiotic levels up to 5,000 times higher than the original.

The broader potential of T7-ORACLE lies in its adaptability as a platform for protein engineering. Scientists can insert genes from humans, viruses, or other sources into plasmids and introduce them into E. coli cells, which are then mutated by T7-ORACLE to generate variant proteins that can be screened or selected for improved function.

This could help scientists more rapidly evolve antibodies to target specific cancers, evolve more effective therapeutic enzymes, and design proteases that target proteins involved in cancer and neurodegenerative disease. The system’s ease of implementation, combined with its scalability, makes it a valuable tool for advancing synthetic biology.

The research team is currently focused on evolving human-derived enzymes for therapeutic use and tailoring proteases to recognize specific cancer-related protein sequences. In the future, they aim to explore the possibility of evolving polymerases that can replicate entirely unnatural nucleic acids, opening up possibilities in synthetic genomics.