FlyBase:Overview

The FlyBase Community

FlyBase engages with our user community through multiple approaches. The primary method for users to get in touch with FlyBase about any matter remains our ‘Contact FlyBase’ page, accessible via the ‘Help’ menu on the NavBar or the link in the footer of any FlyBase page. All other community resources are grouped under the ‘Community’ menu of the NavBar and/or are found on the homepage.

If a user wants to specifically alert us to a Drosophila publication or data therein to be added to FlyBase, then the ‘Fast Track Your Paper’ (FTYP) tool should be used (51). This tool allows the user to indicate the key genes studied and flag data types present in a paper. The resulting gene-to-publication links are submitted directly to the FlyBase database while the data type information is used to prioritize the paper for more detailed curation. We actively solicit FTYP submissions using our ‘EmailAuthor’ pipeline, whereby the corresponding author of a Drosophila publication is automatically sent an email that includes a link to a personalized FTYP form (51). Approximately 50% of authors respond to this request, thereby reducing by half the amount of manual triaging to be done by FlyBase curators.

Our recently launched ‘FlyBase Community Advisory Group’ (FCAG) is a worldwide group of over 500 volunteers (lab heads, postdocs, students, technicians) who use FlyBase for a range of purposes. We contact this group up to six times per year with a survey on a variety of subjects to get feedback about how data collection, presentation and searching on FlyBase can be improved. By consulting this relatively large, diverse group of researchers, we hope to implement changes to FlyBase that are helpful for the greatest number of people.

Users may also help improve FlyBase by contributing to the Human Disease Wiki (described in section 9.3) or the FlyGene Wiki. There is a link to the latter at the top and within the ‘Summaries’ section of each Gene Report. This is pre-seeded with the automatically-generated FlyBase summary and users are encouraged to modify or add to this text to build up a more complete and readable summary of each gene’s main features and functions.

The FlyBase Forum is a Google™ Group that provides an alternative, more open platform for users to interact both with FlyBase and with each other. The forum has two areas: one for general questions and discussions about FlyBase and Drosophila protocols etc., and the other for relevant job postings.

Users are made aware of new or changed features in FlyBase through any of several means. First, there are the ‘News’ and ‘Commentary’ sections of the FlyBase homepage (Fig. 1). Second, users can sign up to receive an occasional Newsletter via email by clicking the link on the homepage. The Newsletter contains release announcements, significant website updates, and other important Drosophila community news. Third, to obtain more frequent updates, users can follow FlyBase on Twitter™ by clicking on the icon in the footer of any FlyBase page. Fourth, users can choose to subscribe to any FlyBase record (a specific gene, transgenic construct, reference etc.) and receive automatic updates through a feed reader by clicking the icon in the ‘Recent Updates’ section of any report page. Finally, users have the opportunity to see and hear about FlyBase updates in person at the Annual Drosophila Research Conference in the USA and the biennial European Drosophila Research Conference, where FlyBase representatives give presentations and are available to answer questions. Previous conference presentations and pamphlets can be obtained via the ‘FlyBase Guides’ link under the ‘Help’ menu in the NavBar.