This is a five-year renewal award to the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC) at Indiana University. Dr. Kathleen Matthews in the Department of Biology is the PI and CoPIs include Drs. Kevin Cook and Thomas Kaufman. The BDSC is an internationally-recognized stock center that collects, maintains and distributes genetic stocks of the fly Drosophila melanogaster. It supports a large and active research community investigating fundamental biological processes through the use of the sophisticated genetic tools developed in this popular model organism. Its current user base includes more than 2,400 research groups and 35 teaching units in 56 countries. 61% of Center use comes from U.S. scientists and 98% of use comes from academic researchers. BDSC provides a comprehensive selection of strains supporting the full spectrum of Drosophila research. The collection consists of over 20,000 different genetic strains containing over 95,000 defined genetic elements including mutations, chromosomal aberrations and transposon insertions as well as tools for gene misexpression, site-specific recombination and transgenesis. BDSC will continue to maintain a website which will provide information concerning stocks, their experimental uses, ordering and account information, and regulatory issues. Information about genetic components of Bloomington stocks is fully integrated into FlyBase, the primary genetic and genomics database for Drosophila workers.
Drosophila strains from Bloomington have been key components in experiments in gene regulation, cell biology, developmental biology, neurobiology, behavioral biology, population biology, ecology and evolution and will continue to have a broad impact in many fields of biological endeavor. The Center will assure that the stocks are used effectively by making BDSC information available through databases and websites found at http://flystocks.bio.indiana.edu
The insect Drosophila melanogaster is used extensively as the subject of experimental research in a wide variety of biological fields including genetics, cell biology, development, physiology, neurobiology, behavior, population biology, evolution and ecology. It is arguably the most versatile multicellular model organism for experimentation, because it combines ease of culture with extremely sophisticated genetic techniques and resources. The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC), which received federal support through this grant, is the largest and most comprehensive repository for genetically characterized Drosophila stocks in the world. It acquires stocks from individual investigators and large-scale resource development projects, and maintains them for future scientific studies. It provides information concerning the composition and experimental use of the stocks to the genetics research community via an extensive website, integration with the online genetics information service FlyBase and personal discussions with scientists. It distributes the stocks to scientists worldwide for use in their research programs. The BDSC is an extremely successful research resource center both in terms of management practices and the support of science, and it is a model for other living stock collections. Over the course of this five-year grant, the BDSC collection doubled in size to 52,684 living stocks. The BDSC distributed 1.02 million samples to over 2,700 research groups in 55 countries. Over the same period, the Drosophila genetics community published thousands of research papers and contributed significantly to discoveries and progress in many areas of biological investigation. As an indispensable resource for Drosophila genetics research, the BDSC contributed directly or indirectly to most of these studies. Investment in the BDSC, made jointly by NSF and NIH through an interagency cooperative agreement, has been important to the success of contemporary biological science and will continue to benefit scientific research in the years ahead.
