Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center

The Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center (BDSC) collects, maintains, and distributes genetically defined strains of Drosophila melanogaster for research and education. The BDSC supports a large, worldwide community of scientists using Drosophila as a model organism for biomedical experimentation. The goals of the BDSC are to provide a collection of documented living stocks of broad value to current research, to preserve documented strains with clear future value, and to provide information and support services that promote maximal exploitation of these materials. We carry over 91,000 stocks, which can be searched and ordered on our website.

The BDSC curates stocks which model various aspects of human disease and human health-related processes and generates user-friendly webpages with human disease gene information, putative fly orthologues, and available stocks. We currently have pages for 49 human diseases or processes including Alzheimer, Huntington, metabolism/diabetes, Parkinson, epilepsy, and muscular dystrophies. 

Visit https://bdsc.indiana.edu/stocks/hd/index.html to see a full list of human diseases and associated BDSC stocks.

Other major categories of stocks available at BDSC:

• Chemical- or irradiation-induced mutations in sequence-defined genes and genetically defined complementation groups
• RNA interference transgenes for knocking out or knocking down expression of specific genes in specific cells
• CRISPR guide RNA transgenes for cell-specific gene knockout with Cas9 or gene expression with Cas9-activator fusions
• Mutagenesis systems for inducing mutations by CRISPR or transposon insertion
• Two- or three-component transcriptional activation systems for expressing genes in specific tissues and/or at specific times
• Tagged proteins – stocks expressing proteins with fluorescent, enzymatic, or epitope tags
• Transposon insertion mutations that tag or disrupt 48% of all genes
• Transposon insertions for swapping in sequence cassettes by recombinase-mediated exchange
• Clonal analysis lines for homozygosing mutations in specific cell types
• Chromosomal deletions and duplications for mutation mapping, assessing allelic strength, and examining dose dependency
• Sequenced wild-type strains for mapping quantitative trait genes and loci