Hung, R. et al. PNAS 117, 1514–1523 (2020)

The midgut of the fruit fry Drosophila melanogaster shares a number of conserved processes and molecular pathways with the intestines of its distant mammalian relatives—humans included. Those similarities have made the fly a useful invertebrate model for studying homeostasis, cell signaling, and stem cell regeneration and maintenance in a complex tissue.

A new resource simplifies things, breaking the fly midgut down into its cellular components. Using RNA sequencing, researchers at Harvard Medical School have assembled a transcriptomic atlas of the male fly midgut at single-cell resolution.

The effort captured the known cells of the fly midgut, revealed new details about differential expression of different cell types, and uncovered five novel ones. The single-cell RNA-seq database can be visualized and explored at https://www.flyrnai.org/scRNA/