Alyssa Slicko

FlyBase Update – October 2025 The termination of the NIH/NHGRI FlyBase grant has placed the long-term sustainability of FlyBase at risk. However, thanks to the generous support of several key individuals and institutions, we are pleased to announce that FlyBase will remain operational through the coming year. We extend our deepest gratitude to Yukiko Yamashita, Cassandra Extavour, Hugo Bellen, Thom Kaufman, the Genetics Society of America / Drosophila Board, the Bloomington Drosophila Stock Center, an anonymous donor and the Wellcome Trust. We are especially thankful for a generous gift from Seemay Chou, Jed McCaleb, and The Navigation Fund. We also greatly appreciate the continued support from the broader Drosophila community – your donations and service fees have been vital in helping us stay afloat. Special thanks also go to Jessica Manning for her tireless administrative work at Harvard, to Ruth Lehmann, Hugo Bellen, and Paul Sternberg for advice and efforts, and to the Board of the European Drosophila Society for all their efforts. Sadly, we must also share that several long-standing FlyBase team members have recently moved on. We are immensely grateful to Susan Russo-Gelbart, Lynn Crosby, Gil dos Santos, Kris Broll, Victoria Jenkins, and TyAnna Lovato for their many years of dedicated service and contributions to FlyBase. Looking ahead, ensuring FlyBase’s sustainability beyond the next year – and successfully integrating with the Alliance – will require new funding sources. We kindly ask for your continued support: • European labs: Please consider contributing to the Cambridge, U.K. FlyBase group • U.S. and other non-European labs: Please consider contributing to the U.S. FlyBase groups • Both U.K. and U.S. FlyBase are working diligently to establish an invoicing system. We appreciate your continued patience. For more information on how to support us, please visit: Contribute to FlyBase wiki page https://wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase:Contribute_to_FlyBase

There's an update on the state of FlyBase on the FlyBase.org front page. You can contribute to FlyBase at this link wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...
We express enormous gratitude to the people, labs, groups, and foundations who have already helped us.
#FlyBase #Drosophila

My department at Dartmouth Medical School is hiring a tenure-track Assistant Professor. We are looking broadly for a biochemist or cell biologist. Please share this add! apply.interfolio.com/171438
@dartmouthbcb.bsky.social @futurepislack.bsky.social

FlyBase needs our help! There is now a system for non-European direct donations. Hopefully an option to invoice labs comes soon, but in the mean time do what you can to save this precious resource!

I just got the notice that all the FlyBase people at Harvard, including me, will be laid off on October 12. I'm devastated.

Two PhD students carrying an image of a drosophila testis down the sidewalk

Two PhD students carrying an image of a drosophila testis across the street

Two PhD students carrying an image of a drosophila testis down the sidewalk

Image of a drosophila testis in a freight elevator

Things you might see in Kendall Square: a giant image of a drosophila testis traveling a mile down the street

Towards more sustainable research: reducing the environmental impact when working with #Drosophila. Challiner, Saurya., Patel, Raff, Fostier, Prokop, A. (2025) @genetics-gsa.bsky.social‬, in press -- doi.org/10.1093/gene... - Always happy to discuss and hear your ideas and views!

I suppose it’s possible that some (very few) people watched Star Wars and Return of the Jedi and ended up rooting for the masked storm troopers and Emperor Palpatine and his acolytes.

And they were all selected for employment into ICE.

The fallacy posed by the MAHAers is that if you eat healthy you are not going to be afflicted by diseases such as cancer. This is not just statistically stupid but it’s also cruel. Imagine telling the parent of a young child with cancer that you should have eaten more veggies. 1/

must be incredibly frustrating and disheartening to have federal funding that was promised to you for important work suddenly and arbitrarily ripped away

A Review of the President’s Fiscal Year 2026 Budget Request for the National Institutes of Health | United States Senate Committee on Appropriations United States Senate Committee on Appropriations

The Senate will review the 2026 NIH budget request on June 10 at 10 a.m. EDT. GSA urges stakeholders to stay informed and engaged.

🔗 Watch live:

We currently have a call for support that has gone out to European labs, to support FlyBase-UK. We are asking our colleagues from labs in the US and other countries to wait for a similar call to them that will go out in the near future, to support the US sites. We thank you for your patience.

URGENT: FlyBase has lost practically all its funding overnight; even user fees are tied up in denied grant funding. 🤬🤯

Any lab using @flybase.bsky.social please donate using the link in post below.

This incredible community, on whose backs our #Drosophila labs depend, can't be left out to dry.

Congratulations to postdocs Melissa Pamula and Amelie Raz, who have both been named 2025 Leading Edge Fellows! www.leadingedgesymposium.org/fellows @remlehmann.bsky.social @leadingedgeprogram.bsky.social

If a foreign government conspired to decimate US science and technology in a manner akin to what Project 2025 architects purport to do, we would go to war.

Just because they are under a cloak of self declared patriotism does not mean that they are not effectively acting as enemies of the state.

A trophy of a sad looking football. The trophy says "Last Place. At least you tried."

A friend in my old lab mailed our fantasy football loser trophy to my lab instead of my home. I then had to explain to the confused student who opened the package why I'm bad at fantasy football (its because I'm too much of a Bears homer).

Text reads "Congratulations to the 2025 Leading Edge Fellows" followed by the Leading Edge logo and www.leadingedgesymposium.org. Below are the headshots and names of the 40 new Leading Edge Fellows. They are Cel Welch Lianna Wat Maria Toro Moreno Sarah Talley Xulu Sun Ines Sturmlechner Virginia Savy Amelie Raz Kali Pruss Caterina Profaci Sarah Pierce Melissa Pamula Kehinde Odufowora Patricia Nano Ariana Musa de Aquino Nour El Houda Mimouni Kathleen Martin Brea Manuel Mable Lam Miri Krupkin Elaine Kouame Megan Kirchgessner Sumin Kim Shubhangini Kataruka Geraldine Jowett Andrea Jones Leanne Iannucci Emily Heckman Allison Girasole Florencia Fernandez Chiappe Tonie Farris Hannah Elam Erin Doherty Xiaoyun Ding Maria Bustillo Julia Brunner Debadrita Bhattacharya Lorena Benedetti Ashley Anderson Krisha Aghi

We are thrilled to announce the 2025 Leading Edge Fellows! 40 outstanding postdoctoral fellows doing pioneering research in a wide range of biological and biomedical disciplines.

Learn more about these exceptional scientists:

www.leadingedgesymposium.org/fellows

‘Devastated’ and ‘Hopeless.’ Researchers Speak Out on Funding Cuts | ACLU

We're suing the Trump administration over its politically-motivated termination of research grants that has already harmed scientists and our communities.

Political ideology shouldn't dictate public health.

All NSF GRFPs to students choosing to attend Harvard in the Fall were just terminated

Other universities must not stay quiet. This will come to our doorstep soon. We are all in this struggle for survival. We need to rally and support each other. 3/3

My sympathy and support for all the international students and postdocs at Harvard. I can only imagine how scary this must feel. Stay strong. And if there's anything I can do to help those in compbio, please reach out. All of us need to rally to help them out. 1/

Here are #NSF education and advocacy talking points.

#SaveNSF

(Shared with permission - CC0; no attribution required)

Certain genes are “selfish," cheating the rules of inheritance to increase their chances of being transmitted. Researchers in the Yamashita lab have uncovered a unique "self-limiting" mechanism keeping the selfish gene Stellate in check: wi.mit.edu/news/selfish...

Trump proposes unprecedented budget cuts to US science Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline, critics say.

Building scientific progress takes decades; dismantling it can happen overnight. If this proposed budget passes, the future of US science looks bleak.
#ScienceFunding #USPol #ScienceMatters #ResearchSky #AcademicSky

Repost w/ correct link!
The Dept of Human Genetics at the Univeristy of Utah is hosting a Rising Stars in Genetics & Genomics postdoc symposium. We are looking to feature postdocs doing cool science! Please self nominate or nominate an excellent postdoc! #ASHGtrainees docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita, who studies how genetic information is passed from parents to offspring, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Full story on our website: wi.mit.edu/news/yukiko-...

National Academy of Sciences Elects Members and International Members - NAS WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 120 members and 30 international members in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original res...

Huge congratulations to my former PI Yukiko Yamashita on her election to the National Academy of Sciences! An amazing scientists and wonderful person who I'm so fortunate to have as a mentor!

🥳🥳🥳

www.nasonline.org/news/2025-na...

Congratulations to Whitehead Institute Member Yukiko Yamashita, who has been elected as a member to the National Academy of Sciences! www.nasonline.org/news/2025-na... @nasonline.org

Been looking forward to reading this since Amelie presented her poster at the #CSHL #germcells meeting!

Modular regulation of the stem cell transcriptome defines self-renewal, differentiation, and dedifferentiation https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.10.648217v1

What I find amazing is that we have to wrestle text to make it perfect, accurate and fit in five pages for a 10% chance of it getting funded, and then some people can say "imagine the wolves in game of thrones lol" and they get ten billion buckaroos no strings attached