Fly FAQs
Many fly research-related jobs are advertised by employers, on standard job search sites, and at career sites run by biological journals. In addition, the FlyBase Jobs posting forum is designed to support fly-related job postings.
There are severals ways to ask questions of fly colleagues.
Bionet.drosophila provides a discussion forum and posting site for Drosophila-related questions, events, and job postings.
FlyBase General Forum lets you ask questions about FlyBase tools and data.
FlySlack connects fly researchers to one another on the Slack platform.
Other ways to reach 'fly people' with research-related questions include posting questions at Twitter (#Drosophila) or asking questions at ResearchGate.
FlyBase maintains a list of facilities providing material resources for Drosophila research.
There are many books, publications, publication collections, and other resources available to help you learn about the history of fly research, basic information about fly development and physiology, and how to perform genetic and other assays using the fly. Here are just a few places to start.
The "Genetics on the Fly" primer by Hales et al. (2015) provides an excellent distillation of background information relevant to Drosophila research.
The "How to design a genetic mating scheme" training package from Roote and Prokop (2013) provides information about how to set up and 'score' fly crosses, such as using visible markers.
GSA Genetics journals' FlyBook chapter series provides expert background information on many areas of Drosophila research.
The Interactive Fly provides background information about Drosophila development.
The Manchester Fly Facility provides background information and links to additional resources for information about flies and fly research.
The FlyBase Resources wiki page lists information, protocol, reagent, and other resources relevant to Drosophila research.
FlyBase also maintains a FlyBase "new to flies" wiki page with links to additional resources.
The "Culture of Drosophila: the laboratory setup" article by Ashburner and Roote (2007) discusses basic fly lab needs like incubators and fly food.
The FlyBase database is considered by many the 'go-to' resource for Drosophila melanogaster gene and genome information.
Additional resources include the following, many of which get their underlying fly gene and/or genome information from FlyBase.
FlyMine (good for batch searches with a list of genes)
Gene2Function (good for viewing an overview of gene information for a fly gene as well as for orthologs in other species)
DIOPT (good for finding orthologs of one or more gene among nine species, including humans and flies, for one or more genes)
Manchester Fly Facility 'fly links' and FlyBase External Resources, as well as the Information Resources page on this site (including the "online resources" and "online databases" categories), provide links to many additional and specialized databases.