Subject: Helping FlyBase: ADRC-10161
Dear Howard,
We are currently curating the abstracts for the upcoming 43rd
(San Diego) Annual Drosophila Research Conference, for FlyBase.
I am writing in connection with your abstract:
'Synaptic plasticity and locomotor behavior are altered by mutations in a
novel ion channel.'
You mention a gene that is new to FlyBase, alpha-1U. Do you know which
of the Genome Project CG annotations your gene corresponds to? All the
CGs have corresponding gene records in FlyBase already and we don't
like to make duplicate records for what is actually the same gene
unless we can't avoid it. If your gene does not correspond to a CG
then perhaps you could tell me its map location, as this is valuable
information for the genome annotation project.
Thank you very much for your help,
with best wishes,
Rachel.
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Rachel Drysdale, Ph.D.
FlyBase (Cambridge),
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Subject: Re: Helping FlyBase: ADRC-10161
Hello Rachel:
The gene referred to in my abstract is listed in Gadfly as CG1517. The
name Dm-alpha1U comes from the review by Littleton and Ganetzky that came
out in Neuron at the time the fly genome was published. The U in the name
indicates that the family formed by orthologs of this gene in C. elegans,
D.melanogaster, and R. norvegicus is Unique in that it is clearly
evolutionarily distinct from all the well known families of four-repeat
six-TM ion channels (sodium channels, L-type calcium channels, etc). The
annotation for the gene in Gadfly is reasonable but we do believe that the
ORF starts substantially downstream of the place they indicate.
In Flybase, the mutants we have identified in CG1517 are listed under
the gene called 'narrow abdomen'. The most serious problem with this
entry is the fact that all existing stocks of the putative P element
allele, P890, do not have a P element in this gene (or anywhere else on
the X chromosome). What this means for the 'excision lines' obtained
from this element, I do not know. Since our discovery of this problem
(well before the publication of the 1997 Genetics paper describing this
allele), I have asked Krishnan to fix this error. But, although he has
confirmed our result, he has not done so.
Hope this is all the information you need.
Howard