Drosophila melanogaster: an old and future ally to radiobiology

From simple viruses to complex multicellular animals, ionizing radiation can have deleterious effects on all organisms. For humans, exposure to radiation can come from a wide range of sources such as environmental contamination, occupational hazards, radiotherapy and space flight. In the next few decades, radiation toxicity will become an increasing healthcare concern as nuclear power usage, risk of nuclear war, space-based industry and cancer incidence are all projected to increase. While the biology of acute radiation sickness is relatively well understood, ionizing radiation can also cause severe chronic effects whose molecular and cellular basis remain largely a mystery. This is partly because complications that arise months or even years after exposure depend on tissue-level responses, and so there are aspects of late radiation toxicity that can only be investigated in vivo. We suggest that Drosophila melanogaster can contribute to understanding this phenomenon. To this date, Drosophila radiation research has been heterogenous in terms of dose, radiation type and developmental stage of exposure, but despite this a pattern of observations suggest that fruit flies experience both short- and long-term radiation injury. Moreover, the genetic underpinning of the Drosophila radiation response seems conserved with that of humans. We propose that Drosophila is well-suited to model radiation damage to tissues, highlighting the potential of the fly to inform clinical radiobiology research.