IU Bloomington is the home to three of the largest Drosophila resource centers used by researchers all over the world. These resource centers include the Bloomington Drosophila Stock center, what some people call the Fruit Fly Store, FlyBase, and Drosophila Genomics Resource Center.
The Drosophila Stock center is the home to over 65,000 different fruit fly species. It collects and maintains and distributes genetic stocks of Drosophila Melanogaster. The flies are fed with new food every two weeks to ensure they are kept alive so they can be sent out to researchers who request them. The flies eat both larva and yeast.
FlyBase is an informatics resource that holds the records to every fly mutation and every gene that is in the fly. FlyBase’s mission is to capture, integrate, and distill the results and conclusions of research using Drosophila as a model organism.
If a fly can not see researchers can take a gene from a mouse or frog that has the same mutation for example and put that gene into the fly and it will fix the defect that the fly has so now it will be able to see.
“The stock center sends out over 3,000 stocks a week to researchers all over the world,” Kaufman Said.
The fruit flies are researched as they help model human diseases and the flies have some of the same genes as humans. Diseases include Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and even Cancer. Researchers use these flies to try and come up with a cure for these diseases.
Last year the Stock center got over 7,000 new flies last year.
In May the the world-class fruit fly genetic center was awarded $2.7 million grant by the National Institutes of Health.
