9601996 This award provides support for the Mid-America Drosophila Stock Center at Bowling Green University. The center maintains a large collection of mutant strains of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, an organism widely used in basic investigations of genetics and developmental biology. On request, samples of mutant strains are provided for use in research and education. The collection was originally established in 1960 at the Institute for Cancer Research in Philadelphia using strains from the personal collections of H.J. Mueller and J. Shultz. The collection moved to Bowling Green University in 1996 and, since then, has grown to include over 4,000 strains isolated by a number different investigators. During the period of this award, it is expected that the most useful strains will be shifted to a similar, but larger, NSF-supported collection at the Indiana University. This merging of the two collections is expected to increase the effectiveness with which collection holdings are made available to the research community in the future.
