[The fruit fly as a tractable model animal for infectious diseases: implication for understanding of host-pathogen interaction].

Use of invertebrate models of infection has given exciting insights into host-pathogen interaction for a number of bacteria. In particular, this has revealed important factors of the host response with remarkable parallels in higher organisms. Recently, emerging of multi-drug resistant bacteria raises a requirement of developing new therapies such as controlling host defense system. Finding host factors that can purge bacteria from human body could give us a new concept of pharmaceutical targets. For this purpose, fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, has been used as a model animal for human infectious diseases and became a tractable tool for identifying novel gene products that can activate host defense mechanisms. In this review we will discuss about recent progress of Drosophila model of pathogen infection, which could imply a useful genetically tractable model for human infectious diseases.