Dr. O’Dowd, HHMI Professor and Chair of Development and Cell Biology, and her colleagues at UC Irvine, in collaboration with Dr. Robert Reenan’s lab at Brown University placed a gene mutation that causes human fever-induced seizures into fruit flies. In the Oct. 10 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience they report that the mutant flies display a seizure phenotype at high temperature.  The drosophila knock-in model resulted in novel insights into neural mechanisms contributing to heat induced seizures and provides a rapid and low-cost platform to screen for new treatments.

See more at  http://today.uci.edu/news/2012/10/nr_odowd_121017.php