Development of a PCR-RFLP assay to identify among field-collected larvae.

The fruit fly is a model organism to study several aspects of metazoan biology. Most of the work has been conducted in adult fruit flies, including laboratory and field-derived specimens, but larvae recently became a valuable model to better understand animal physiology, development, or host-microbe interactions. While adult flies can be easily assigned to a given species based on morphological characteristics, such visual identification is more intricate at the larval stage.