FLYBASE--A DROSOPHILA GENOMIC AND GENETIC DATABASE

果蝇是最重要的模式生物之一

The fruit fly, Drosophila, is one of the most important model organisms for many aspects of modern biological research, especially for issues regarding the biology of metazoa. Comparative studies have clearly demonstrated that the metabolic, cellular, and developmental regulatory networks are highly conserved within the animal kingdom, and in many cases, even to other taxa. Particularly because of the sophisticated genetics of the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, the best-studied drosophilid species, it has led the way in elucidating many of the pathways. Much work in mammalian systems, especially the mouse and humans, has been completely based on the strong foundation that Drosophila research has provided. We are now at the point were we are beginning to understand the physiological roles of many of the roles that, when mutated, contribute to human disease. In many cases, the insights emerge largely from work on the Drosophila cognates of these genes. To take maximum advantage of the information of the information available for Drosophila, both for the Drosophila, both for the Drosophila researcher and for scientists working on other organisms, it is essential that data on the fly be organized and accessible to the broad biological community. This is the role of the Flybase Consortium. In this application, FlyBase requests 5 years of funding to continue its effort to provide the scientific community with the essential genomic and genetic information on D. melanogaster, and other drosolipids. This information will continue to be readily accessible on-line through the Flybase WWW server, mirrored at several sites throughout the world. An important new aspect of the project is the merger of the public informatics teams of the Berkeley and European Drosophila Genome Projects with the original FlyBase group to become an expanded FlyBase Consortium. This new FlyBase Consortium will provide the community with a completely unified view of all Drosophila genetic and genomic data from the whole organism and population structure information down to the sequence level. The expanded project will involve close coordination among the 5 participating sites of data capture, management, organization and presentation. Important features for the research community will be a re-organization of the WWW server and a implementation of a variety of new tools, including many Java-based graphical displays. One issue for the biological databases to address is how to interconnect effectively among themselves. Issue of interconnectivity are crucial, as only a fraction of the relevant biology can be housed in a single repository. FlyBase will continue in its historic leadership role in promoting interconnections: through working with other groups to produce software that will permit data exchange between databases, and generally through contributing to a joint effort to address the needs of the scientific community.