Fly-TILL

[Barbara Wakimoto]

Dear Drosophilists,

 We are writing to announce the opening of Fly-TILL, a new service for 
the Drosophila research community. Fly-TILL is part of the larger 
Seattle TILLING Project (STP), a joint facility of the Fred Hutchinson 
Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington Department of 
Biology.

 TILLING (Targeting Induced Local Lesions in Genomes) is a high 
throughput method to identify EMS-induced mutations in genes of 
interest. The strategy was originally developed to identify mutations 
in Arabidopsis (for a description of the methods see Till et al. 
2003). The methods have been adapted for use with Drosophila 
melanogaster at our facility using the Z3 collection, a set of strains 
that carry heavily EMS-mutagenized Chromosome 3 (Koundakjian et al. 
2003). As we announced at last year’s Drosophila Meetings, we have 
performed a pilot screen of the Z3 lines (Till et al. 2004). Based on 
this screen, we expect Fly-TILL to be about as efficient as the 
Arabidopsis TILLING Project which has delivered over 5,000 mutations in 
over 400 genes so far.

 To place your order, or learn more about Fly-TILL, go to 
http://tilling.fhcrc.org:9366/fly/

The Web site describes how TILLING works, what Fly-TILL expects to 
deliver, the characteristics of the Zuker collection, answers to 
frequently asked questions and user policies. 

 Fly-TILL is a service that must be entirely supported by user 
fees. The cost will be $2800 (U.S. dollars) to screen 3072 lines or 
$5000 for the entire population of 6129. Orders will be filled on a 
first-come, first-serve basis.

 
Sincerely,

The Fly-TILL team

References:

Till, B.J., Reynolds, S.H., Greene, E.A., Codomo, C.A., Enns, L.C., 
Johnson, J.E., Burtner, C., Odden, A.R., Young, K., Taylor, N.E., 
Henikoff, J.G., Comai, L., Henikoff, S. (2003) Large-scale discovery of 
induced point mutations with high-throughput TILLING. Genome Res. 
13(3):524-30.

Till, B.J., Young, K., Bowers, E., Codomo, C.A., Burtner, C., 
Hassinger, R., Greene, E.A., Comai, L., Zuker, C.S., Wakimoto, B., 
Henikoff, S. High-throughput TILLING for functional 
genomics. (2004) Abstract for the 45th Annual Drosophila Research 
Conference.

 Koundakjian, E.J., Cowan, D.M., Hardy, R.W., Becker, A.H. (2004) The 
Zuker collection: a resource for the analysis of autosomal gene 
function in Drosophila melanogaster. Genetics 167(1):203-6.


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