For more than a century, the humble fruit fly has paved the way for many critical scientific breakthroughs.
This tiny insect helped researchers figure out that X-rays can cause genetic mutations. That genes are passed on from parent to child through chromosomes. That a gene called period helps our bodies keep time — and that disruptions to that internal clock can lead to jet lag and increased risk for neurological and metabolic diseases.
Those discoveries, along with nearly 90,000 other studies, are part of a key online database called FlyBase that researchers routinely use to help them more quickly design new experiments. These tests explore the underlying causes of disease and could help with the development of new treatments. Science builds on prior insights, and a handy repository of past advances serves as kindling for future discoveries.
The website receives about 770,000 page views each month from scientists working around the world on developing personalized therapies for rare cancers, modeling human neurodegenerative diseases and screening drug candidates for conditions like Alzheimer’s.
Now, that critical resource is on the brink of layoffs that endanger its future and ability to make research more efficient.
This spring, the Trump administration, as part of its broader $2.2 billion funding cuts at Harvard University, rescinded a grant used to maintain FlyBase.
“I use FlyBase every single day. It’s so essential,” said Celeste Berg, a professor of genome sciences at the University of Washington, who is not part of the team that operates FlyBase. “What we know about human genes and how they function comes almost completely from model systems like drosophila.”
Humans share about 60% of our genes with fruit flies, also known by their scientific name Drosophila melanogaster.
FlyBase’s now-uncertain future highlights just how interconnected and interdependent research efforts are and how the effects of funding cuts to one institution can ripple worldwide. More than 4,000 labs use FlyBase.
Harvard was receiving about $2 million a year in federal funding to maintain FlyBase, which was the vast majority of the website’s total operating budget. But the University of New Mexico, Indiana University and the University of Cambridge in England are partners that help Harvard manage FlyBase and are beneficiaries, too.
“This is not just affecting Harvard,” said Brian Calvi, a professor of biology at Indiana University, who is part of the FlyBase management team. “The ripple effect is to the international biomedical research community.”
Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences rescued FlyBase with interim funding, but that support will cease in October, according to Norbert Perrimon, a professor of developmental biology at Harvard Medical School.
A judge earlier this month ordered the Trump administration to restore funding to Harvard researchers who lost grants, but money has not begun to flow to FlyBase, Perrimon said. The administration has promised to appeal the decision, which could halt the flow of funds.
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