Dear Drosophila researcher,

It is time to cast your vote for new members of the National Drosophila Board of Directors. As you are likely aware, the Board plays an important role for the Drosophila research community, so please take a few seconds to learn about the Board and participate in this election. The Board's duties include: overseeing community resource centers and addressing other research and resource issues that affect the Drosophila research community. The Board also administers the finances for the annual North America Drosophila Research Conference and its associated awards, and it chooses the organizers and the site of the annual meeting. The Board consists of nine regional representatives, eight from the U.S. and one from Canada, who serve 3-year terms, as well as a representative for primarily undergraduate institutions. It also has three elected officers including a President, a President-Elect and a Treasurer. In addition, the Board has ex officio members, who represent Drosophila community resource centers or international Drosophila communities. For more information about the Board and the summaries of the annual Board meetings see:

http://flybase.bio.indiana.edu/static_pages/news/board.html

This year we are electing the President-elect, who will serve as President starting with the fly meeting in 2014. We are also electing a Treasurer and representatives for the Mid-Atlantic and California regions as well as foreign representatives, who will all serve 3-year terms starting with the fly meeting in April 2013.

Please participate in this election. It is your opportunity to choose the individuals who will help set priorities and garner support for community resources. In order to record your vote please go to the following URL and follow the instructions on that page:

Vote here

Please remember you may vote for candidates in ALL categories even though you do not reside in the region represented by the candidates. Balloting will end January 15, 2013.

Thank you,
Drosophila Board Election Committee
Denise Montell (Chair)
David Bilder
DJ Pan
Laurel Raftery

Dear Drosophila Colleagues,

This is the ONLY call for submissions for the 2013 Drosophila Image Award. The award will be presented at the upcoming Drosophila Research Conference in Washington, D.C. on April 4th, 2013. Presence at the meeting is not required to enter or win an Award.

The Image Award recognizes the important role that compelling images have played in Drosophila research. To encourage and celebrate this role, finalist images will be displayed throughout the conference, and the winner will be presented with a plaque.

The Award will be given to the most striking image that clearly conveys a point of important biological information in Drosophila research. All images that have been or will be published in a primary research journal in 2012 are eligible.

Submissions should be made via email to imageawardlists.berkeley.edu; requests to upload large files via filesharing can be made to same. Please see http://www.Drosophila-images.org for more details and complete instructions for submission, as well as for images of past winners.

Please note that we accept submissions of videos as well as still images, and give separate awards in each category. See the website for size and format for submission. We encourage you to submit your work for consideration. Submissions are open until Feb. 4, 2013.

Sincerely,

The Drosophila Image Award Committee:

Michelle Arbeitman
David Bilder
Anne Ephrussi
Richard Mann
Bill Sullivan

We sadly announce that Gerold Schubiger, Professor of Biology at the University of Washington, passed away on November 10th, 2012, after a courageous struggle with cancer. He was at home with Margrit - his wife, best friend, and scientific collaborator - on his final days. Gerold dedicated his scientific career to the use of Drosophila to study developmental processes. In his graduate work with Ernst Hadorn, he established the fate map for the Drosophila prothoracic leg disc. He continued his work as a postdoctoral fellow with Howard Schneiderman and in his own lab from 1972 to 2012 at the University of Washington. Gerold excelled at using clever experimental manipulations on imaginal discs and early embryos to get Drosophila to reveal mechanisms of determination, transdetermination, and cell cycle regulation. He published outstanding papers, including two in 2012 that he found particularly gratifying because they reported the fate maps for the meso- and metathoracic leg discs and new molecular insights on transdetermination, bringing his life’s work full circle.

There are many in our community who loved and admired Gerold. He was rigorous in his experimental approach, tenacious in scientific discussions, and immensely proud of his scientific offspring. We will miss him and honor him as a wonderful colleague who enthusiastically shared with us his deep love of family, friends, beautiful mountains, and the joys of scientific discovery.

For those wishing to honor Gerold with a remembrance, his family suggests a contribution to The DeLill Nasser Fund, The Genetics Society of America or The Group Health Foundation Hospice Fund.

Barbara Wakimoto

FlyBase 2013 Release Schedule

The following are the tentative dates of FlyBase releases in 2013. There will be 6 releases this year.

• FB2013_01 - January 18^th
• FB2013_02 - March 8^th
• FB2013_03 - May 3^rd
• FB2013_04 - July 12^th
• FB2013_05 - September 13^th
• FB2013_06 - November 1^st

Please feel free to Contact us with any questions or comments.

A new version of the Drosophila White Paper is now available for public comment. The first Drosophila White Paper was written in 1999. Revisions were made in 2001, 2003, 2005, 2007 and 2009. The 2009 version is available at:
http://flybase.org/static_pages/news/whitepapers/DrosBoardWP2009.pdf

Here the Drosophila Board of Directors presents an updated White Paper identifying and prioritizing current and future needs of the Drosophila research community. This draft was prepared by the Board and will be modified according to feedback received from community.
http://flybase.org/static_pages/news/whitepapers/DrosBoardWP2012.5.pdf

We invite your participation in identifying and prioritizing resources that benefit our entire community. Please post comments on this topic on the FlyBase forum, http://flybase.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=270 , by July 7, 2012.

Would you like to learn how to efficiently use FlyBase for your daily research needs? If so, please click over to the 2012 NAR Database Issue and read our article "FlyBase 101 - the basics of navigating FlyBase".

Peter McQuilton, Susan E. St. Pierre, Jim Thurmond, and the FlyBase Consortium
FlyBase 101 – the basics of navigating FlyBase.
Nucleic Acids Research (2011) 39:21; doi: 10.1093/nar/gkr1030

The following is a reproduction of an announcement by Developmental Dynamics:

Call for Papers for a Special Issue in DEVELOPMENTAL DYNAMICS on “Drosophila as a Model for Understanding Development and Disease”

We are pleased to announce a call for papers for a Special Issue of Developmental Dynamics celebrating the importance of research on Drosophila in development and disease. The issue will be guest-edited by Ken Irvine (irvinewaksman.rutgers.edu), Rutgers University, and Amit Singh (amit.singhnotes.udayton.edu ), University of Dayton.

Drosophila investigators are invited to submit papers to Developmental Dynamics for a special issue of the journal to be published in late 2011 or early 2012. Papers should be submitted no later than June 15, 2011, for consideration for the special issue. Research articles exploring mechanisms of development, Technique articles describing new techniques of broad impact, or Disease Connection articles describing novel models/preparations/approaches for understanding the developmental basis of disease are welcomed. Ideas for appropriate Reviews articles are also encouraged (contact the Reviews Editor, John F. Fallon: jffallonwisc.edu). All articles undergo thorough peer review to determine their merits for publication.

Developmental Dynamics is committed to publishing papers of central importance to the developmental biology community. All special issue articles are open access immediately upon publication, allowing your work to be disseminated widely throughout the scientific community. There are no page or color charges, and Developmental Dynamics is fully compliant with the open access policies of NIH, HHMI, and the Wellcome Trust.

Manuscripts should be submitted online at: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/dvdy-wiley

Author Guidelines can be found at:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1002/(ISSN)1097-0177/homepage/ForAuthors.html

We look forward to receiving your submissions.

Best wishes,
Gary C. Schoenwolf, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Developmental Dynamics

We sadly announce that Dr. Victoria Finnerty, Professor of Biology at Emory University, has passed away at the age of 73. She remained a fully active faculty member until the end of last year. She was in Chicago with her son and his family during the last few months. After her graduate and postdoctoral studies with Art Chovnick at the University of Connecticut, Vickie came to Emory in 1976 where she maintained an active lab throughout her career. Her early seminal work focused on the use of high resolution recombinational analysis of the maroon-like gene to understand gene structure in Drosophila. Her interests then shifted to understanding the molecular function of the maroon-like gene in the production of a molybdenum-containing cofactor required for the activity of xanthine dehydrogenase (rosy) and other enzymes. Vickie was well-known as a gifted teacher and mentor, and during the last several years of her career she focused most of her efforts on undergraduate education in the Emory Biology Department. Her kindness, warmth, dedication and even-tempered manner will be greatly missed by her many friends in the Drosophila community. She was loved by all who knew her.

Respectfully,
Barry Yedvobnick, Janis O'Donnell & Bill Gelbart

From this point forward FlyBase will be providing Apollo viewable annotation data in chado-xml format only. The latest version of Apollo has been modified to retrieve annotation data via the web in this format. Therefore, we recommend that you upgrade to the latest available version of Apollo

We will no longer provide annotation data in GAME-XML format and while Apollo is still able to load and view existing GAME-XML data the data files must be available on the local machine as web retrieval of GAME files is no longer supported.

Please be aware that when Apollo is retrieving annotation data from the web it is obtaining precomputed chunks of xml. While the pieces have been generated to not span any gene models retrieval by sequence range may not result in the exact sequence requested being loaded into Apollo.

Please use the contact FlyBase form to send questions and requests for help to FlyBase.

FlyBase offers direct "linkouts" from our gene report pages to other web-based Drosophila data services. The FlyBase Consortium wishes to thank the organizers and developers of these data sets for helping us provide a great deal of valuable information on Drosophila genes and genomes.

• BDGP in situ Gene Expression Database (http://toy.lbl.gov:8888/cgi-bin/ex/insitu.pl)
• Drosophila melanogaster Exon Database (http://proline.bic.nus.edu.sg/dedb/index.html)
• Drosophila RNAi Screening Center (http://www.flyrnai.org/)
• FLIGHT - Integrating Genomic and High-Throughput data (http://flight.licr.org/)
• Fly GRID Interaction Data (http://biodata.mshri.on.ca:80/fly_grid/servlet/SearchPage)
• FlyMine - integrated genomics and proteomics (http://www.flymine.org/)
• NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/projects/geo/)
• Heidelberg Database for RNAi Phenotypes (http://www.dkfz-heidelberg.de/signaling/ernai/ernai.html)
• Hybrigenics Drosophila PIMRider (http://pim.hybrigenics.com/pimriderext/droso/index.html)
• Yale Developmental Gene Expression (http://genome.med.yale.edu/Lifecycle/)
• InParanoid computed orthology calls (http://inparanoid.cgb.ki.se/index.html)
• PANTHER ClassificationSystem (http://www.pantherdb.org/)

In addition to these links FlyBase also provide direct links to the Drosophila records in the major international nucleotide, protein and bibliographic databases.