Making connections with GO: an integrative approach to highlighting medically relevant Drosophila data

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At first glance fruit flies and humans seem very different. But if we look closer we see that they share certain features: limbs, a brain, a heart and much more besides. If we look even more closely we see that this is because we share genes in our DNA. We can use these similarities to study human disease because three quarters of genes associated with human disease are found in fruit flies too. Disrupting genes in fruit flies can tell us how they normally work in humans, how they cause diseases when they are not working well and give us clues about how to we might be able to fix problems caused by the faulty genes. Fruit flies have many advantages for studying disease. For example, we can do many different experiments with flies very quickly, and they get old within weeks, so they are really useful for studying neurodegenerative conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.Extensive research is carried out using fruit flies by scientists around the world, generating a huge amount of data. It is important that scientists are able to easily and quickly access these data so that they can build on existing knowledge to devise new experiments in their own research. This is where biological databases come in: they have dedicated teams of people (curators) who read the published research papers and enter the information into a computer database. Curators do this by linking scientific terms, taken from special dictionaries, to biological objects such as genes. The aim of our project is to use one such scientific dictionary, called the Gene Ontology, to attach labels to genes that describe what they do and where they do it. We will focus on those fruit fly genes that are equivalent to human genes that are implicated in diseases. This work will be done in the context of gene networks - knowing how genes function together gives a better understanding of how they contribute to our day to day life, and how their disruption leads to disease. Altogether, this project will facilitate the transfer of knowledge gained in fruit flies to the medical community, ultimately helping the development of effective treatments of human diseases.