Users of TRiP RNAi and sgRNA fly stocks take note: the Weake lab at Purdue University brought to our attention that some TRiP fly stocks carry a mutant allele of seveneless. Jonathan Zirin worked with Spencer Escobedo and Vikki Weake, as well as with folks at the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, to quickly identify the source, sequence the mutant allele, and pubilsh a micropublication so we can get the details to the community. Bottom line, as stated in the micropublication, "The presence of the sev[21]  mutation will not generally affect the use of these stocks, as the X...

We have been taking a critical look at how we organize our online tools on the Online Tools Overview page. And more generally, we have been thinking about new ways to spread the word about the many resources in our suite of online tools. One way that we at the DRSC like to think about these tools is how they fit into the start-to-finish order of events in a screen or other experimental project. Various tools help define lists of genes to be studied, help identify reagents for the study,...

Laboratories at the Skirball Institute at New York University and the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University reported results of two different cell-based Drosophila RNAi screens in papers published this week. The screens have in common that they looked at interactions between the host insect cells and a microbe -- the endosymbiont Wolbachia in one study and baculovirus in the other. For more, check out the newly published studies. For both these screens, the DRSC provided libraries for screens that were then performed at the host institution.