Drosophila articles from across Nature Portfolio

Animals need to be able to evaluate environmental pH. Mechanisms that mediate sour taste and acid sensing have been reported across species, but less is known about the detection of high pH. Mi et al. identify the gene alkaliphile, which encodes a high-pH-gated chloride channel in the gustatory system of flies.

Two new toolkits that leverage deep-learning approaches can track the positions of multiple animals and estimate poses in different experimental paradigms.

Optogenetic and thermogenetic tools have been limited to applications for single-state control of cellular processes. A single-component optogenetic tool was found to act as both a temperature sensor and a photoreceptor, enabling multi-state control of developmental signaling.

Kim et al. present a drosophilid genome resource comprising 101 de novo genome assemblies from 93 drosophilid species obtained by nanopore sequencing.

X-ray holographic nano-tomography is a promising complement to electron microscopy for connectomics studies.