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FlyBase is a worldwide online repository of fruit fly research. Fruit flies have many genetic similarities to humans.Getty Images: arlindo71
By Hadley Barndollar | [email protected]
For decades, scientists have gleaned information from the antennae, brains and even ovaries of millimeter-sized fruit flies for medical research as varied as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, addiction, traumatic brain injuries, birth defects and nerve regeneration.
But President Donald Trump’s sweeping biomedical research cuts at Harvard University threaten the world’s only repository of that data.
The free website FlyBase, considered the “Wikipedia of fruit fly research” among scientists worldwide, is a project under Harvard’s stewardship. It recently saw its funding terminated by the National Institutes of Health.
“There really isn’t a second version of what we do,” said Victoria Jenkins, a genome database coordinator at Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology. “We are the one resource for this information.”
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The reason why a database containing information about every fruit fly (or Drosophila) gene and genome is so important? The bug typically associated with rotting fruits and vegetables happens to share nearly 70% of its DNA structure with humans, making them ideal test subjects in many cases, researchers say.
Discoveries fueled by fruit fly research have been honored by the Nobel Prize six times, dating back to 1933.
The May termination of FlyBase’s NIH grant puts at risk the future of the project, containing 32 years worth of data.
FlyBase website
FlyBase is the only database of fruit fly genome research in the world.Courtesy screenshot
“There are a lot of unexpected places that very common, big discoveries come from,” fruit flies included, Jenkins said.
Jenkins is one of the people who keeps FlyBase, a partnership between four universities, running. She extracts, interprets and archives data to make it accessible to the public and other researchers.
Before working with FlyBase, Jenkins did hands-on research with fruit flies, looking at their genes involved in stem cell regulation. Using carbon dioxide, she would anesthetize them on a plate in order to physically handle them.
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Susan Russo, the program director of FlyBase who is based at Harvard, said bone morphogenetic proteins — which help form bone and cartilage — were understood using fruit flies, “and flies don’t even have bones.”
“People say, why a fruit fly? It’s a model organism that’s used before clinical trials for human diseases,” Russo said. “It’s basic science and translational investigations — ultimately things that go to clinical trials. It’s been critical for human disease.”
FlyBase enables work of 4,000+ labs
FlyBase is a multi-university partnership between Harvard, Indiana University Bloomington, University of New Mexico and University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
Because Harvard was the NIH grant awardee, the termination ceased funding for all of the involved entities. Now, researchers are seeking financial support elsewhere to preserve the website as is — at the very least.
The European researchers are fundraising across the pond, while the U.S.-based operations work on their own mechanisms to collect emergency dollars.
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Both Jenkins and Russo claimed FlyBase’s association with Harvard was the central reason why it’s funding was cut.
Pressuring the elite university to change its policies and surrender sensitive data in the name of antisemitism, the Trump administration has inundated Harvard with a barrage of funding and grant revocations, as well as actions trying to stop its ability to enroll international students.
Last week, Trump said his administration could be nearing a deal with Harvard, but few details are currently known. Harvard is also actively suing the administration in two separate federal court lawsuits.
Victoria Jenkins
Victoria Jenkins is a genome database coordinator, a staff scientist position in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University.Courtesy
In a statement, NIH told MassLive that all federal funds to Harvard currently remain paused as part of the administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. The agency cited Trump’s executive order on “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” related to rooting out antisemitism on college campuses.
“NIH remains committed to supporting high-quality, taxpayer-funded science — free from ideological agendas and political bias,” the agency said. “If Harvard meets the standards set by the Administration, FlyBase investigators will regain access to funding and will be able to continue their important work in advancing biomedical research.”
Jenkins, whose entire salary is funded by the federal government, called fruit fly research “incredibly cost-effective,” making the grant revocation all the more frustrating.
“Flies are inexpensive,” she said. “They’re easy to work with, easy to get started, and they don’t have a lot of the ethical concerns associated with other animals. The amount of work you can do is so much easier.”
A Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to fruit fly research as recently as 2017 for “the discovery of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm.” Using fruit flies as models, the researchers were able to isolate a gene that controls the normal daily biological rhythm.
Liqun Luo, a professor of biology at Stanford University, recently told The Transmitter, a neuroscience online publication, “it would be a disaster” if FlyBase “goes dark.”
According to its NIH grant description, FlyBase enables more than 4,000 research laboratories to further their work.
While Harvard announced in May it would dole out $250 million as a stopgap for its researchers facing funding cuts, its FlyBase employees don’t know yet if they’ll be eligible.
The immediate goal, Jenkins and Russo said, is to capture the database as is so they can ultimately migrate it over to a larger website initiative funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute. When complete, that website will consolidate genetic model organism data — including worms, zebrafish, rats and fruit flies — in one place.
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