Dr. Pallanck's laboratory uses the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster as a genetic model system to understand the mechanisms underlying neurodegenerative disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease. Flies are a terrific system for this work because of the many powerful genetic tools that have been developed over the long history of their use as a model organism, and because recent work has established that neurodegenerative disorders can be successfully modeled using flies. At present, the Pallanck laboratory is pursuing three different projects: (1) Mitochondrial quality control; (2) Functional analysis of the glucocerebrosidase (GBA) gene; and (3) Traumatic brain injury.