ABSTRACT
Drosophila are capable of learning in a variety of positively or negatively reinforced associative or non-associative tasks utilising olfactory, visual and tactile stimuli. Furthermore, although mutant and normal tau are associated with different tauopathies, they are often used interchangeably in model systems. In agreement, recent studies reported that modifiers of degeneration of Drosophila retinal cells did not mediate changes in the pathology of central nervous system (CNS) neurons. Several tau isoforms accumulate in the human CNS and are the products of tissue and temporal alternative splicing of a single transcript encoded by the gene on chromosome 17. In fact, the regional distribution of pathology appears correlated with the characteristic tau isotype constitution of the aggregates, which groups tauopathies in five different classes molecularly. However, significant tissue-specific differences in the phosphorylation of tau proteins were revealed. Whether Drosophila will be used as a vehicle for tauopathy-specific drug discovery also, remains to be determined.
