Can Drosophila be used as an animal model for psychiatric disorders?
As Foka et al. has shown in their recent publication in the Journal of Neuroscience (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/39/7496), indeed Drosophila is suitable for studying psychiatric disorders. More specifically, they experimentally validated the involvement of the GWAS-suggested furin gene to schizophrenia using pharmacogenetic approaches in Drosophila. Their work has been selected by the editors of the journal as noteworthy for the scientific community (https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/39/7331).