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

乍一看，果蝇和人类似乎非常不同。但如果我们仔细观察，我们会发现它们有一些共同的特征：四肢、大脑、心脏等等。如果我们更仔细地观察，我们会发现这是因为我们在DNA中共享基因。我们可以利用这些相似性来研究人类疾病，因为与人类疾病相关的四分之三的基因也在果蝇中被发现。破坏果蝇的基因可以告诉我们它们在人类中是如何正常工作的，当它们不起作用时是如何引起疾病的，并为我们提供了如何解决由缺陷基因引起的问题的线索。果蝇在研究疾病方面有很多优势。例如，我们可以用苍蝇做很多不同的实验，它们在几周内就会变老，所以它们对研究神经退行性疾病非常有用，比如阿尔茨海默病。世界各地的科学家利用果蝇进行了广泛的研究，产生了大量的数据。重要的是，科学家能够轻松快速地访问这些数据，以便他们能够在现有知识的基础上，在自己的研究中设计新的实验。这就是生物数据库发挥作用的地方：它们有专门的团队（管理员），他们阅读已发表的研究论文，并将信息输入计算机数据库。策展人通过将从特殊词典中获取的科学术语与基因等生物对象联系起来来做到这一点。我们项目的目的是使用一个这样的科学词典，叫做基因本体，给基因贴上标签，描述它们做什么和在哪里做。我们将重点关注果蝇的基因，这些基因与人类的基因相当，与疾病有关。这项工作将在基因网络的背景下进行——了解基因如何协同工作可以更好地理解它们如何对我们的日常生活做出贡献，以及它们的破坏如何导致疾病。总之，这个项目将促进将在果蝇身上获得的知识转移到医学界，最终帮助开发治疗人类疾病的有效方法。

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.