Using GO to enhance the utility of Drosophila data to medical research

十年前，果蝇黑腹果蝇成为首批完成基因组测序的复杂动物之一。这似乎是一个奇怪的选择——谁会关心苍蝇，为什么会呢？我们从人类基因组开始吗？事实上，一个世纪以来，果蝇一直是基因研究的宠儿。果蝇不仅易于使用，而且没有许多与在医学研究中使用动物有关的伦理问题，而且果蝇和人类之间有足够的相似之处，使其与医学研究直接相关。已知与人类疾病相关的基因中约有75%也在果蝇中发现，在许多情况下，有证据表明它们在两种物种中以相似的方式起作用。弄清楚苍蝇身上的某些东西是如何工作的，可以给科学家提供线索，当人类疾病中相同的基因出现问题时，如何解决问题。这种苍蝇被证明是多种人类疾病的良好模型，比如脑部疾病。由于它的普及，科学家们每年都会发表数千篇关于苍蝇基因的研究论文。对于研究一种特定人类疾病的科学家来说，找到所有可能与他们的工作相关的公开信息，并使在不同物种中进行的实验有意义，可能是一项艰巨的任务。该项目的目的是总结苍蝇研究数据，使所有生物学研究人员更容易找到并利用这些数据。这项工作将包括数据库管理员阅读同行评审的研究论文，并总结有关基因功能的任何数据。为了做到这一点，我们将使用一本由相互关联的科学术语组成的特殊词典，即基因本体论，它的发展是为了简洁地描述基因产物的作用以及它们在细胞中执行这些功能的位置。术语之间的联系使得搜索和显示与不同物种相关的生物过程变得容易。我们还将标记果蝇数据库中的基因，以表明它们与人类基因和/或人类疾病有关——这将使科学家更容易找到他们需要的信息，为未来的研究提供信息。这项工作将由剑桥大学的科学家与果蝇数据库FlyBase和基因本体联盟合作进行。

Ten years ago the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster became one of the first complex animals to have its genome sequenced. This may seem an odd choice - who cares about flies and why didn?t we start with the human genome? In fact, the fruit fly has been a favourite species for genetic research for a century. Not only is it easy to work with and free from many of the ethical concerns associated with using animals in medical research but there are enough similarities between flies and man to make it directly relevant to medical research. Around 75% of the genes known to be associated with human diseases are also found in the fly and in many cases there is evidence that they work in similar ways in both species. Figuring out how something works in a fly can give scientists clues as to how to fix things when the same genes go wrong in human disease. The fly is proving to be a good model for various human diseases such as brain disorders. As a result of its popularity, scientists publish thousands of research papers on fly genes every year. For scientists working on a specific human disease, it can be a daunting task to find all of published information that may be relevant to their work and make sense of experiments preformed in different species. The aim of this project is to summarise fly research data in a way that makes it easier for all biological researchers to find and make use of it. The work will involve database curators reading peer reviewed research papers and summarising any data about gene function. To do this we will make use of a special dictionary of interconnected scientific terms, the Gene Ontology, that has been developed to succinctly describe what the products of genes do and where in a cell they carry out these functions. The connections between terms makes it easy to search and display biological processes that are related in different species. We will also label genes in the fly database to indicate that they are related to human genes and/or human diseases - this will make it easier for scientists to find the information they need to inform future research. The work will be carried out by scientists at the University of Cambridge in collaboration with the Drosophila database FlyBase and the Gene Ontology Consortium.