Lab fruitflies may soon all face the same limited menu.

Matthew Piper and his colleagues at University College London have developed a synthetic foodstuff for fruitflies (Drosophila melanogaster) that is made up of precise amounts of amino acids, vitamins and sugars that the insects need.

Feeding diverse foods to flies, as is common in labs, can drastically change their metabolism, but giving a standard food to all lab flies would ensure that it does not influence experimental results.

The researchers note that flies raised on the synthetic food grow more slowly and are less fertile than those fed a mix of sugar and yeast, suggesting that there are improvements to be made.

Nature Meth. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nmeth.2731 (2013)