Researchers at the Large Scale Biology Laboratory are using Drosophila as a model to study bacterial infections. They show that the extinction in hemocytes of the gene encoding deubiquitinase USP36 reduces the survival of flies infected with
Listeria monocytogenes, with no further proliferation of the bacteria and that this effect is specific to Listeria. This type of study should contribute to the search for strategies other than antibiotic therapy for the treatment of infectious diseases.