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International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences Review Article
The structural and functional evaluation of amylase activity in Drosophila melanogaster, in comparison to other related insect species: a detailed approach
Aparajita Chakraborty and Md. Masiur Rahman
Year : 2022 | Volume: 7 | Issue: 2 | Pages: 1-5
Received on: 2022-01-20
Revised on: 2022-01-29
Accepted on: 03/01/2022
Published on: 03/06/2022
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Aparajita Chakraborty and Md. Masiur Rahman( 2022).
The structural and functional evaluation of amylase activity in Drosophila melanogaster, in comparison to other related insect species: a detailed approach
. International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences, 7( 2), 1-5.
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Abstract
The role of Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly, in biological research has been highly remarkable, particularly in genetics and developmental biology. It is a valuable model organism for research for almost a century which holds a significant impact on human health. One of the remarkable features of this organism recently identified, is the ability of the larvae to excrete amylase. Amylase, a glycosyl hydrolase is responsible for the degradation of 1,4 glycosidic bonds in starch molecule to it’s constituent monosaccharides. The excretion of such a digestive enzyme by Drosophila larvae was predicted to play an important role in the physical softening of food and improvement of efficiency of food ingestion. Apart from Drosophila, certain insects such as bugs, silkworm, honeybee, or even other species of the Drosophila family are known to secrete amylases, which may differ in properties such as optimum pH, temperatures or protein sequences as reported by the presence of several amylase gene copies. Various studies had been performed on the various ‘isozymes’ of such amylases to determine their catalytic activities, similar heat sensitivities, or temporal expressions but the exact role of such enzymes in the human system is yet to be elucidated.
Keywords
Amylases, Catalytic activities, Drosophila,Gene copies, Insects.
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© The Author(s) 2025. This article is published by International Journal of Zoology and Applied Biosciences under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (creativecommons.org), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
