2012 Drosophila White Paper

[Josh Goodman]

This draft was prepared by the Board and will be modified according to feedback received from community.

http://flybase.org/static_pages/news/wh ... 2012.5.pdf

We invite your participation in identifying and prioritizing resources that benefit our entire community. Please post any comments here by July 7, 2012.

[leslievosshall]

I completely agree with this passage in the White Paper ("Loss-of-function mutations: Central to all genetic studies in Drosophila is the ready availability of loss of function mutations in all genes, including insertion, deletion, point mutation and RNAi knock-down lines"), but feel the proposal does not go far enough. The recent development of TALENs as agents of genomic modification would allow the Drosophila community to develop loss-of-function mutations in every Drosophila gene. I commend the Genome Disruption Project for its heroic efforts to use transposons to tag and disrupt genes, but there are still large numbers of genes that have eluded these efforts. If the fly community were to commit to developing TALENs that target the initiating ATG codon of every fly gene, we would have the capacity to knock out every gene and also use such TALENs to knock reporters into loci of interest. These targeted methods may turn out to be more rapid and efficient than conventional transposon-mediated methods and should be seriously considered.

[oliver]

It is terrific that the FlyBoard keeps the important whitepaper updated on behalf of the community. Thank you!

I have a couple of minor points:

1) The first two paragraphs mention the utility of Drosophila for translational research, but this concept is not integrated into the rest of the document. At least some of the resources that the Drosophila community would like to have, or have maintained, could also be of great use to people working on other models and more directly on human disease (e.g. supporting queries from databases used by translational scientists, confirmation of knockdowns phenotypes from HT human-cell RNAi screens, cross querying expression maps). The size of the user community will influence the impact of a given resource and we should identify those that have, or could have, an impact in the larger biomedical research community.

2) Proposals are open competitions judged by peer review and programatic impact. In my opinion, naming an existing resource is not good form, as it implies that the Drosophila Board favors one grant proposal over others prior to the fact. It is best to focus on need and not currently operating resources. I suggest deleting reference to specific projects.

Brian

[Josh Goodman]

Comments by Dr. Dirk-Henner Lankenau.

https://docs.google.com/open?id=1yDsvji ... d-a1S1cbQC

[stephenr]

when reading this document it seems as if you don't know about the recently sequenced
DGRP of ~ 200 lines, and the 8 new Drosophila genome sequences in the databases as part of the Drosophila Modencode comparative genomics project
(although the latter is not published yet)
Best - fringy

[Josh Goodman]

My basic interest in submission is to add my voice regarding the direction of research for the genus Drosophila, especially for Puerto Rico, and especially regarding environmental-evolutionary issues. (Incidentally, I find it confusing that you seem to use the word "Drosophila" both for the genus and for the species Drosophila melanogaster).

My and my students' research interest, for most of my career, has been the evolution of reproductive strategies in the cardini group of species, especially the dunni subgroup, and I believe that the environmental-evolutionary aspects of Drosophila research, of necessity concerned with species other than Drosophila melanogaster as well as the latter, is a critical subject during this period in human history, where in the US as well as quite a few other countries, the strongest political forces appear to scorn any interest in biodiversity and climate change.

David L. Bruck, Ph.D.
San Juan PR