You are right! Thanks

looks right to me.

Dear John,
this is a great picture of a Drosophila and I was wondering if I could use it in a talk I am giving about Drosophilidae and about a new pest to the US. Of course I will credit you for your picture.
Cheers
Martin

noticed your comment sir,probably way to late but yes anytime.I
apologize for the late response.

Thanks so much, I gave already several Drosophila suzukii talks, and I might use this nice pic in some future talks! Thanks for the permission...
Martin

Martin,
Isn't Drosophila the fly that has something like 20% of human DNA? Seems I remember reading in Eric's guide.
Robert

Yes, in a way... Because all life is related we share to different degrees the same DNA or better the same genes. We have some of the fundamental genes for our metabolism in common (e.g. for the enzymes to digest sugar, or how to produce ATP, the fuel for our cells etc) with many different organisms. I am not sure about the %, but if it is 20 with Drosophila, it should be also 20% for more or less all the insects (give or take). Because we have the whole humane genome and the complete Drosophila melanogaster (and some more Drosophila species) genome we can easily compare them. In detail it is a bit more complicated. Think of 2 books and you want to see how similar they are. If you compare the letters, they are the same, if they are written in the same language, if you compare the words, they might still be very similar, but the meaning might be very different. So you need to compare the sentences and the meaning and there might be bigger differences... So to say how similar 2 books are or 2 genomes depends on the level of detail. But we share genes which we inherited from a common ancestor and they differ a bit in their sequence, but they are coding for very similar enzymes or products. So the "master gene" which strats making the human eye and the fly eye are very similar, the genes which are then responsible for making the details of the eyes are very different between us and flies. But you can cut the master gene for eyes out of a mouse and insert it in the wing of a fly during development, and the fly will produce an eye on the wing (this is an experiment which was actually done)/ Of course the fly can not see anything with the wing eye, because there are no nerves to connect the eye to the brain.... So we are all relatives of all living things, some more distance than others, but I always thought that was a very nice thought that we are a very big family...
Maybe this answer was a bit more detailed then you hoped for ;-)
Cheers
Martin

and you didn't even have time to prepare a lesson plan. Thanks for clearing up the DNA mystique.

You are welcome.... Reality is often extremely fascinating...