Drosophila was first described in 1830. For the first time, it was 190 1 year. William Ernest Castle, a zoologist and geneticist, tried to understand the results of multiple generations of inbreeding and hybridization from one generation. 19 10, Thomas Hunt Morgan began to cultivate Drosophila in the laboratory and made a systematic study on it. After that, many geneticists began to use Drosophila as research materials and gained a lot of genetic knowledge, including the distribution of genes in the Drosophila genome on chromosomes.

Drosophila has only four pairs of chromosomes. They include a pair of sex chromosomes, usually called the first chromosome or X and Y chromosomes, and three pairs of autosomes. The latter is recorded as the second, third and fourth pairs of chromosomes. The fourth pair of chromosomes is very small and contains few genes. Drosophila is very suitable for research. A large number of fruit flies can be cultivated in a bottle, and the reproduction speed is fast. Martin buchs published his book.

Its 13600 gene was sequenced in 2000. Most genes are strikingly similar to human genes. The study also found human oncogenes or potential oncogenes related to cancer in the genetic material of Drosophila.

In the study of developmental biology, human beings have also gained a lot of knowledge from fruit flies. As early as 1900, William Custer, a professor at Harvard University, took Drosophila as the object of embryo research for the first time. Since then, fruit flies have been widely used in this field. In 1970s, German scientist Christian Neuslein-Forhad began to study the developmental genes of Drosophila. She learned that four genes in an egg cell determine or monitor the development of a fertilized egg (see Hox gene). 1980, she published a paper "Variation Affecting the Number and Polarity of Nodes in Drosophila melanogaster", for which she shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus in the United States.