MINI REVIEW article
Front. Psychiatry
Sec. Molecular Psychiatry
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2025.1622281
This article is part of the Research TopicFrom Molecular Changes to Behaviour: Exploring Neuropsychiatric DisordersView all articles
Beyond vertebrates: Drosophila melanogaster as a model to study negative symptoms of schizophrenia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
- 2Washington State University, Pullman, United States
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Schizophrenia is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. While positive symptoms have been extensively studied, negative symptoms-such as anhedonia, social withdrawal, and apathy-remain challenging to model and treat. Vertebrate animal models for schizophrenia have provided insights into some of the underlying mechanisms associated with this disorder. Recently, Drosophila melanogaster has emerged as a valuable model due to its genetic tractability, conserved neurochemical pathways as compared to vertebrates, and suitability for high-throughput behavioral analyses. Mutations in genes such as dysb1, Rim, and Neuroligins have been linked to behaviors in flies resembling negative symptoms of schizophrenia, supporting the relevance of this animal model in psychiatric research. Moreover, behavioral paradigms aimed at assessing social interaction, motivation, and anhedonia in Drosophila are being refined to better capture schizophrenia-related deficits. The use of Drosophila enables precise investigation of neural circuits and molecular pathways underlying negative symptoms of schizophrenia, research that has the potential to lead to novel therapeutic targets.
Keywords: Drosophila, Schizophrenia, Negative symptom, dysbindin-1 (DTNBP1), Rim1, neuroligin
Received: 03 May 2025; Accepted: 16 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Elgueta, Hidalgo and Campusano. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Jorge M Campusano, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
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